Searchlight Pictures has released the first trailer for A Complete Unknown, filmmaker James Mangold’s forthcoming biopic of Bob Dylan. The movie, which takes place in the early days of Dylan’s career, is set against the 1960s New York folk scene. The trailer features Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, providing a framing device, while in between the Seeger sections, a young Bob Dylan plays “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” a song from his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The trailer suggests the movie will depict a love triangle between Dylan’s onetime girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who was featured on the cover of that album, and folk legend Joan Baez, played in the film by Monica Barbaro.
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Rotolo is not in the movie — technically. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a fictional character who will stand in for Rotolo. You can see the trailer below.
The relationship with Rotolo — widely regarded as a “muse” behind a number of early Dylan songs — ended badly, and Dylan famously released an 8-minute song attacking her family, who were never supportive of the romance. In the 2007 film I’m Not There, where a number of actors play characters based on Dylan, Heath Ledger played a character whose relationship with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Claire was loosely based on the Dylan/Rotolo romance. In that movie, Ledger and Gainsbourg recreated the cover of A Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which is arguably the most famous single image of the singer’s career. During her life, Rotolo was never happy to have her entire public persona defined by the three-year relationship with Dylan, but she did later use a cropped version of the image on the cover of her autobiography.
During the years the movie took place, Dylan became the mot famous folk singer in the world, rising to fame, and ultimately alienating many of his friends and much of his target audience when he plugged in to play rock at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It seems likely, with a riff on the doomed Rotolo relationship and the clear indications that Dylan’s affair with Baez will appear onscreen, that this is a movie with a pretty big rise-and-fall structure.
Here’s the official synopsis for the film:
Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s, A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician BOB DYLAN’s (Timothée Chalamet) meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation – culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Timothée Chalamet is Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. A Film By James Mangold. Co-starring Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz and Scoot McNairy. ONLY in theaters this December.
