Fans have been left rather flummoxed by Timothée Chalamet singing as Bob Dylan in the teaser trailer for the legendary musician’s upcoming biopic, A Complete Unknown.
The teaser begins with glimpses of Chalamet, with curly brown hair and dark glasses, walking the dark streets of New York City, where Dylan’s career took off.
Chalamet is then heard crooning 1960s Dylan song A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall as the American singer-songwriter, aping his slightly harsh yet instantly recognisable tones.
It appears to have slightly taken aback some fans though, who said they couldn’t ‘take him seriously’ as well as being ‘not sure’ about his casting.
The US actor, 28, who is also a producer for the movie – which only just wrapped filming in June – also transformed into Dylan by wearing his folk singer-style clothing for A Complete Unknown.
However, it was his voice as Dylan – confirmed to be all Chalamet’s own singing by the film’s director James Mangold – that drove the most reaction.
‘Hearing Bob Dylan’s voice come from Timothée Chalamet is so… I can’t take this seriously I’m sorry,’ wrote @annienasj on X.
‘That singing ain’t it,’ insisted fan Mundillo, while @postgym asked, ‘Ok whose voice is that?’ – which we’ve already established was the Wonka star’s himself.
‘I am not a high fan of his singing here, but I am hyped for him,’ admitted @Emmatheslayer22, and @realbigbuckets posted: ‘Not sure I like the casting. Great rendition of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall though.’
However, others were well on board with the actor’s performance, with fan Lainey enthusing: ‘I like that u can hear the Dylan influence in the voice, but it’s not too close that it can be considered a total parody.’
‘He sounds just like him!’ claimed @StaffPickFilms, while @lestatdeswift sniped: ‘Timmy fangirls in the quotes not understanding this sounds exactly like Bob Dylan.’
‘I’m afraid that he ate with this kids, he sounds like Dylan,’ insisted @itskendallrae among a chorus of calls for Chalamet to receive his second Oscar nomination for the role.
Fight Club actor Edward Norton appears as American folk singer Pete Seegerat the top of the trailer too, introducing a young Dylan to a small crowd in a venue.
‘I want to tell you a little story,’ he tells the audience. ‘A few months back my friend Woody Guthrie and I, we met a young man, he dropped in us out of nowhere, and he played us a song, in that moment we got a feeling we were getting a glimpse of the future.’
Chalamet is then shown performing, which is interspersed with clips of him with The Great actress Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a character based on Suze Rotolo, an artist who was part of the Greenwich Village scene along with Dylan and was his girlfriend in the early 1960s.
The Dune: Part Two actor is also glimpsed kissing Top Gun: Maverick actress Monica Barbaro as folk singer and counterculture figure Joan Baez, with whom he would sing duets such as With God On Our Side.
Filmmaker Mangold also directed the critically acclaimed Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, which was nominated for five Oscars, winning one for best actress for Witherspoon.
A Complete Unknown will follow the now reclusive musician Dylan from a 19-year-old and his ‘meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts’ up to the singer’s electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
During the early 1960s, Dylan was at the forefront of folk music being revived in the US through the albums Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ which relied on acoustic guitar music.
In 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, he shifted to working with electronic instruments and his set at the Newport Folk Festival was criticised for being very loud, including from Seeger, who he had been close to.
Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, he was the first songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, with the Swedish academy crediting him with ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’.
His songs have been recorded more than 6,000 times, with artists as varied as The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and Adele finding both commercial and critical success with covers.
Dylan has to date sold more than 125 million records globally and won a best original song Oscar in 2001 for Things Have Changed, which he wrote for the film Wonder Boys.