Since 2020, when it was announced that James Mangold would direct a biopic about Bob Dylan, I have been following the production. Initially called “Going Electric”, it is now A Complete Unknown and began filming in New York, with Timothée Chalamet in the lead role. The 2025 Oscars are starting to be designed…

The original argument

What was commented on in the first moments was that the film’s script would focus on the night Dylan cried, the same night when he shocked folk music fans and friends by playing an electric guitar at the Newport festival in 1965. Hence the name going electric

It was one of the highlights of the singer’s career because he was booed so intensely when trying to play Like A Rolling Stone that he was unable to finish the song and had to leave the stage suffocated by the noise. They say, in tears. He gave in to come back and play, on the guitar, his classics Mr. Tambourine Man and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. But when the applause came, he left the stage without thanking him or returning for an encore that everyone was begging for. What’s more, he only returned to Newport 37 years later, wearing a wig and a fake beard, mocking the event. Grudge? You’re welcome!

The scene will certainly be in A Complete Unknown, but the film will have even more.

Youth and romance that make for a classic cover

Recording for the Bob Dylan biopic only began in March 2024, partly due to the delay imposed by the 2023 strikes as well. If, when announced in 2021 as the main star, Timothée Chalamet’s name caused some strangeness, today it generates anxiety. With the Dune franchise being successful in cinemas and having done nothing bad when singing and dancing in Wonka, he didn’t even record two frames, and campaigns have already begun that it will be an Oscar role in the actor’s career. Even more so since he won’t dub the singer, just because Dylan’s voice is truly unique

According to reports, the film will follow Dylan’s emergence on the New York folk music scene during the 1960s, shortly after he landed in the Big Apple from Minnesota. In other words, he will cover his entire folk period before embracing rock.

As the images show, young Dylan walks around the Greenwich Village neighborhood with his guitar, with a look that would be a bit of a ‘classic Dylan’. As the film’s director commented, let’s see how the 17-year-old hitchhiked to New York to meet Woody Guthrie, one of folk music’s biggest idols. He was hospitalized and Dylan goes to him and sings Woody a song he wrote for him. He quickly befriends Pete Seeger, a folk singer and social activist, who is like a son to Woody. With Pete’s help, Dylan begins to circulate in the fervent intellectual and musical universe of New York in the 1960s. Even the electric guitar, let’s remember!

Dylan’s women: Suze, Joan…

The young Bob Dylan was a seductive and mysterious man and had an official girlfriend, the young Catholic and Italian Suze Rotolo, the role that Elle Fanning will play in the film. It is with Suze that he is featured on the iconic cover of her second LP, Freewheellin’, released in 1963 and which includes some of her biggest hits, including Blowin’ in the Wind.

It was after falling in love with Suze that Dylan embraced musical activism, with politicized lyrics. The two lived on West 4th Street (where they took the famous photo on the album cover) and she came from a left-wing family, with her parents being members of the American Communist Party. However, the Rotolos didn’t like their relationship, something that would also influence the young musician’s composition.

When she accepted her parents’ proposal to go to Italy for six months, Dylan missed her, writing not only love letters but songs like Don’t Think Twice Is Alright, Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance, and Down the Highway (later they would have more songs for her) and their unstable romance would come to a painful end for both.

Dylan’s involvement with Joan Baez, which hindered his relationship with Suze Rotolo, emerged in the circuit of folk music shows, with duets on and off stage. Joan, who will be played by Monica Barbaro, was at the height of her fame and had already appeared on the cover of Time magazine and her performances with Dylan helped him gain fame as well.

A strong cast playing legends

In addition to Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Elle Fanning as Suze Rotolo and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, the cast of A Complete Unknown also includes Nick Offerman as Alan Lomax, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and now Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, then Benedict Cumberbatch was forced to give up on the project due to delays.

Now that filming is underway, we can imagine that we will have the film ready by the end of the year. As I said, a preview of the 2025 Oscars. Of course, we will return to the subject!

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