Hoy viaja por el norte del país. A ochenta millas de Canadá, donde se dice que los vientos golpean con fuerza en la frontera. Cuando su camioneta Toyota alquilada llega a una intersección suburbana sombreada por árboles, apaga el motor y sale a toda velocidad hacia el aire de finales de enero. Lleva una chaqueta de plumas encima de una sudadera gris y la capucha puesta sobre su pelo castaño despeinado. Su destino es una casita cuadrada de color crema en la esquina, al final de un sendero enmarcado por arbustos gemelos. A la izquierda hay un cartel de calle relativamente nuevo: Bob Dylan Drive.
Pasó la última hora y veinte minutos conduciendo por la helada autopista 53, haciendo suficientes derrapes entre Duluth y Hibbing, Minnesota, como para que las aseguradoras de al menos dos grandes franquicias de Hollywood se pusieran a buscar Xanax. Pero Timothée Chalamet tiene una misión, y esta peregrinación es una de sus últimas.
Suéter de Balenciaga
Se suponía que tendría cuatro meses para prepararse para interpretar a un joven Bob Dylan en la pantalla. En cambio, gracias en parte a una pandemia y a algunas huelgas de Hollywood, ha tenido cinco años. Todo ha ido bastante lejos. Empezó sin saber casi nada sobre Dylan y terminó siendo un autoproclamado “discípulo devoto de la Iglesia de Bob”, haciendo referencias a tomas descartadas (la “Percy’s Song” de 1963 es una obsesión) y a canales de YouTube de copias pirata de Dylan. “Tuve que llevar la preparación al límite, casi hasta saber psicológicamente que lo había hecho”.
Chalamet ha estado trabajando con un entrenador vocal, un profesor de guitarra, un entrenador de dialecto, un entrenador de movimiento, incluso un chico de armónica. En un momento dado, escribió las letras de Dylan en hojas de papel y las pegó en sus paredes. Chalamet lleva su guitarra acústica a las clases de canto, donde a veces, sin previo aviso, aparece hablando con la voz de Dylan. En la película, A Complete Unknown , que se estrena el 25 de diciembre, terminaremos escuchando a Chalamet cantando y tocando canciones enteras, de verdad, en vivo en el set. ” No puedes recrearlo en el estudio”, argumenta más adelante. “Si estuviera cantando con una guitarra pregrabada, de repente podría escuchar la falta de movimiento de brazos en mi voz”.
Chalamet creció adorando a Kid Cudi, con “aspiraciones de rapear desde el principio” por derecho propio. Sigue siendo un fanático del hip-hop, pero ahora ha reprogramado su cerebro tan profundamente que está empezando a interesarse por Grateful Dead. E incluso mientras filmaba otras películas, Chalamet nunca abandonó por completo Bob Land. En su teléfono hay un video de él en el set de Dune cantando “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” con el pijama intergaláctico de Paul Atreides, y una foto donde toca la guitarra con su disfraz de Willy Wonka.
Un hombre de 82 años y pelo blanco llamado Bill Pagel sale de la casa para saludar a Chalamet. Pagel, un farmacéutico jubilado y quizás el principal coleccionista de Bob Dylan del mundo, compró la casa en 2019. Dylan vivió aquí con su familia entre los seis y los 18 años, y Pagel está convirtiendo silenciosamente la casa en un museo en honor a su antiguo ocupante, restaurándola y llenándola con objetos de su colección. Chalamet pasa una hora en la casa, sentado en el mismo dormitorio donde un joven Robert Zimmerman contemplaba el suelo nevado y reflexionaba sobre su futuro. Hojea una colección de discos de 45 rpm que Dylan poseía en realidad: Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly.
Chalamet ducks out for a scheduled tour at the local high school, where he sees student actors rehearsing on the very stage where Dylan played with his teenage rock & roll band. Even the Steinway piano he bashed away on is still there. When the teens in the drama club realize who’s watching their rehearsal, they freak out, and Chalamet spends a while answering their questions.
Jeans by Celine.
Before leaving town, he heads back to the house one more time, this time trailed by three young women who jump out of their car, seeking an autograph or a selfie. Pagel hustles him inside, where Chalamet takes in a key artifact hidden away in the basement: a drawing Dylan made circa 1960 on the back of his copy of an album by the archetypal protest singer Woody Guthrie, who wrote “This Land Is Your Land.” The young Dylan, in the process of remaking himself in Guthrie’s image, sketched himself on a road to New York, marked with a “Bound for Glory” sign. At the end of the path is a drawing of Guthrie.
Dylan was manifesting his actual future in the Greenwich Village folk scene, not to mention the eventual plot of an awards-season Hollywood biopic that would attract a generational heartthrob more than 60 years later. In January 1961, in a moment vividly reenacted, with some light fictionalization, in A Complete Unknown, Dylan found Guthrie at the New Jersey hospital where he was being treated for Huntington’s disease. The upstart took out his guitar, and sang for his hero.
It was the beginning of the improbable four-year journey the film chronicles, in which Dylan became Guthrie’s artistic heir, igniting a generation with the raw prophecy of his imagistic lyrics and the countrified snarl of his voice, before strapping on a Fender Stratocaster and transforming into something else entirely. Along the way, he was mentored by Guthrie’s friend and fellow folk singer Pete Seeger (played in the film by an impressively unrecognizable Edward Norton), fell in love with the young artist and political activist Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the film, and played by Elle Fanning), and dabbled in a musical and romantic coupling with fellow singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whose fame initially eclipses his own.
Unlike so many other Sixties heroes, Dylan stubbornly kept on living, molting through phase after phase as the decades piled on, and he’s not done yet. But his very persistence may obscure just how much he changed the world in his initial run, including that Dylan-goes-electric moment, which was really a gradual, multiyear transformation of style and subject matter, from acoustic protest songs to thunderingly abstract rock. Many assumptions we take for granted about popular music across genres — that superstars can be unconventional vocalists, that pop can be a vehicle for deep personal and political expression, that lyrics can be poetry, that artists can transform radically between eras — have roots with Dylan’s work from 1961 to 1965. His impact went way beyond rock: Artists from Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone covered his songs, and as George Clinton recently reminded me, even the sound and lyrics of Motown changed after “Like a Rolling Stone.”
It’s been suggested that Dylan is too mysterious, too alien, for the kind of linear narrative A Complete Unknown attempts, that he could only be captured by a movie like 2007’s I’m Not There, which kaleidoscopically splits his role among multiple actors. The new movie’s director and co-screenwriter, James Mangold, already added the best kind of Hollywood gloss to Johnny Cash’s life story in his last music film, the Oscar-winning 2005 biopic Walk the Line. (More recently, he served as Steven Spielberg’s handpicked successor, directing last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.) Mangold refuses to believe that Dylan’s world-shaking genius means he can’t be shown as a human being, an idea he mocks in the voice of a clueless critic: “How do you write about Bob Dylan? It’s not eclectic enough! You should be bleeding about Bob Dylan!”
Outfit by Prada
Jumpsuit by Prada.
That said, it’s hard to overstate the challenge the filmmakers faced. “People are deeply protective of Bob Dylan and his music legacy,” Chalamet says, “because it’s so pure in a sense, and they don’t want to see a biopic mishandle that.” Not to mention that he was playing, in his understated words, “someone who wasn’t a straightforward person,” an artist who’s always taken a certain glee in shrouding his true self. On top of that, he had to manifest much of that performance musically. “He never wanted to take the easy way out,” says Chalamet’s guitar teacher, Larry Saltzman, a high-end session musician who toured for years with Simon and Garfunkel. “If I presented something to him like, ‘OK, this is the real way, but there’s a little bit of a shortcut,’ his answer to that was always ‘Don’t show me the shortcut.’”
Chalamet eventually sends Mangold a photo of Dylan’s hand-drawn map, and the purity of its hero worship underscores the director’s point that maybe Bob isn’t so elusive after all. “It’s really just an act of admiration and love,” Mangold says, pondering Dylan’s journey. “This young man shows up. He’s inspired. I mean, it couldn’t be less complicated.”
In that map, and his entire time in Minnesota, Chalamet also starts to see something in Dylan he recognizes, a feeling he’s not afraid to acknowledge he once had himself: “You’re connected to destiny. But that connection is fragile.”
“You’re connected to destiny. But it’s fragile.”
T imothée Chalamet doesn’t look anything like Bob Dylan right now. Here in New York, in the last days of August, he barely looks like Timothée Chalamet. A Complete Unknown wrapped 10 weeks ago, and on the other side of the country, Mangold is leading a postproduction sprint to get the movie out for its Christmas Day release. Chalamet is already preparing to shoot his next project, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, in which he plays a 1950s ping-pong champion. Accordingly, he’s cut his fluffy hair, which turns out to have held at least 25 percent of his essential Timmy-osity. The stubbly mustache and goatee he’s grown knock off another 10 percent. When he sneaks into a chaotic, overcrowded Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in Washington Square Park a couple of months later, hair still cropped, goatee gone, mustache grown in further, he somehow looks less like himself than the guy who wins.
We meet in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan once lived; in the film, there’s a poster-worthy shot of Chalamet on a misty evening in front of its vertical neon sign, in full Dylan-in-’65 regalia. It feels a lot less iconic when we stroll by it in broad daylight, with Chalamet dressed like a college kid, in cargo shorts and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, tasteful gold chain around his neck, brown Yankees cap pulled low. The only reminders of his preposterous level of celebrity are his Nike Field General ’82s, a reissue he singlehandedly popularized when he showed up to an NBA game in a prerelease pair last year.
We head west on 23rd Street, crossing Eighth Avenue, with Chalamet casually dodging bikes like the Manhattan native he is. It’s an overcast weekday afternoon, and the streets are crowded, but somehow, no one even glances his way. “This feels like home,” he says. “I feel good.” He has a meeting later with Safdie — who was relieved to learn that today’s interview was about Bob Dylan, not his apparently top-secret ping-pong project — and has to fly out to France soon for the birth of his older sister’s first child. Nevertheless, Chalamet is palpably relaxed as he strides along, hands in pockets. Finishing the movie after all of this time has got to help, but he swears he never felt burdened by it all. “This is the kind of pressure I want in my life,” he says. “This is the kind of pressure I love.”
Outfit by Prada.
Near the beginning of the film, Dylan meets Guthrie in his grim hospital room, where, in one of the film’s deviations from fact, Norton’s Seeger happens to be already visiting. Bob introduces himself with the name “Dylan” for what may be the first time in his life, with a subtle mix of defiance and hesitance. Then he plays “Song to Woody,” one of Dylan’s first great songs, start to finish. It’s a make-or-break sequence in more ways than one, and it happened to be one of the first major scenes Chalamet shot. Even as the film’s Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Seeger are judging Dylan’s performance, the audience is doing the same with Chalamet. In the finished movie, it all works, down to the guitar picking, the sweat on Chalamet’s pallid forehead, and the subtle prosthetic on his nose. “His performance,” says Norton, “is off-the-charts great.”
“I went home and I wept that night,” says Chalamet. “Not only because ‘Song to Woody’ is this song I’ve been living with forever, and I felt like we brought it to life, but also because I felt like I could take myself out of the equation. The pride I was feeling had no vainglory in it. I just felt, ‘Wow, this is like old-school theater or something.’ We’re, like, bringing life to something that happened, and humbly and bravely going on this journey to hopefully bring it to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t know about it. That felt like an honorable task.”
He first encountered A Complete Unknown, originally titled Going Electric and based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, in an emailed list of potential projects, before Mangold was attached. At that point, Chalamet had a fairly vague idea of Dylan as a distant figure music fans were obligated to revere, an artist beloved by a childhood friend’s dad. Initially, Chalamet simply liked Dylan’s look. “On a quick Google, there was something behind the eyes, you know?”
He soon learned that Dylan at first saw himself as a rock artist, but ended up a folk-music superstar, before winding his way back to rock stardom. Chalamet quickly mapped that scenario onto his own experience. The way he likes to see it, Dylan, for all his reverence of figures like Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Odetta, used the folk world as a sort of back door. “If he couldn’t become Elvis or Buddy Holly immediately,” Chalamet says, “he found Woody Guthrie and stuff that was a little more accomplishable, and happened to be really good at it. And that immediately hit a bone with me.”
Jeans by Celine.
Chalamet became a movie star with roles in indie films that punched way above their weight commercially, playing a sexually awakened, fruit-violating teen in Call Me By Your Name, a virginity-snatching jerk in Lady Bird, a tortured young addict in Beautiful Boy, a lovestruck suitor in Little Women. But as a kid, he obsessively rewatched The Dark Knight, and quiet dramas were never his dream. He auditioned for action franchises, movies like Maze Runner and Divergent, and failed every time. “I would always get the same feedback,” he says, with real pain. “‘Oh, you don’t have the right body.’ I had an agent call me once and say, ‘I’m tired of getting the same feedback. We’re gonna stop submitting you for these bigger projects, because you’re not putting on weight.’ I was trying to put on weight. I couldn’t! I basically couldn’t. My metabolism or whatever the fuck couldn’t do it.”
He was a brilliant young actor with an extraordinary knack for choosing rich indie roles, but he was also taking what he could get. “I was knocking on one door that wouldn’t open,” he says. “So I went to what I thought was a more humble door, but actually ended up being explosive for me.” Chalamet eventually found his way into the Dune movies, and he unabashedly sees his turn as a sandworm-riding space messiah in the year 10,191 as his own going-electric moment. His earlier roles, he says, were “so personal and vulnerable. There’s an intimacy to that work that I hear in Bob’s early music, in his early folk songs.” He pauses, and seizes the metaphor. “And then eventually you want to use different instruments.”
He also related to the idea that Dylan’s story, and his art, can’t be boiled down to any particular trauma. Unlike Cash or, say, Dewey Cox, he’s unburdened by his past, doesn’t look back. Dylan has never once had to think about his entire life before he plays, and neither has Chalamet. “I related to the feeling that my talent could be my talent,” he says. “I could draw the picture of an unconventional upbringing. I grew up in arts housing, Manhattan Plaza, which is a funky way to grow up. I could try to paint it negatively to you. I could try to paint it positively, but it’s a bit of everything. It’s nuanced.” His point is that it doesn’t matter. “I don’t need to point to some thing in my youth. Your talent is your talent. The thing you gotta say is the thing you gotta say. You don’t need the Big Bang.”
E lle Fanning has been acting since she was three years old, but she’d never been this excited for a rehearsal before. During preproduction for A Complete Unknown, an assistant sent her an itinerary for the week, casually mentioning a rehearsal with Mangold … and Bob Dylan. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” she says via Zoom, her blue eyes sparkling. It’s a Sunday afternoon in October, and she’s relaxing in her hotel room in Norway, on a day off from shooting a movie with director Joachim Trier. “I was thinking about all these things to say and ask. I was picking out my outfit. ‘I’m meeting Bob Dylan today!’”
“I went home and I wept that night. This was a song I’d been living with forever, and we brought it to life.”
The creators of A Complete Unknown are hoping the movie births a whole new generation of Dylan aficionados, and believe it or not, there are already some Bob-is-babygirl Gen Z stans on the social media fringes. But Fanning, 26, was way ahead of them. She’s been a fan since age 13, when writer-director Cameron Crowe introduced her to Dylan’s music on the set of We Bought a Zoo. “I wrote ‘Bob Dylan’ on my hand every day in middle school,” she says. Playing Dylan’s first love, then, couldn’t have been more perfect for her: “It’s like I manifested this part.”
As she steeled herself to meet her idol that day, Fanning opened the door to find Mangold, bearded and authoritative-looking. Next to him was Timothée Chalamet. No one else. The confusion was simple: In the interest of immersion, Chalamet was listed as “Bob Dylan” on the production’s call sheets, and a game of telephone had ensued. “I’m probably the first person in life,” Fanning says, “to be let down by having a rehearsal with Timothée Chalamet, right? Like, the first girl in history.”
While he certainly wasn’t on set, the real Dylan was, in fact, involved in A Complete Unknown, and even has an executive-producer credit. During the pandemic, he had several meetings with Mangold in Los Angeles, and eventually went through the screenplay, line by line. “Jim has an annotated Bob script lying around somewhere,” Chalamet says. “I’ll beg him to get my hands on it. He’ll never give it to me.”
“I felt like Bob just wanted to know what I was up to,” Mangold says. “ ‘Who is this guy? Is he a shithead? Does he get it?’ — I think the normal questions anyone asks when they’re throwing themselves in league with someone.”
Mangold won’t say it directly, but Fanning says she was told it was Dylan himself who wanted the film to avoid using the real name of his first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who died in 2011. She was an artist and activist who introduced him to left-wing politics, inspired “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” among many other songs, and appears on his arm on the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. In Dylan’s eyes, Rotolo was “a very private person and didn’t ask for this life,” Fanning says. “She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.” Nearly 60 years after they broke up, Dylan was still protective of the woman he once called “the could-be dream lover of my lifetime.”
Tee shirt: Custom.Pants by Chanel, Shoes by Miu Miu. Hat by Louis Vuitton Virgil Archive
Hoodie by Balenciaga. Belt: Stylists own. Mask designed by Aidan Zamiri. Printed by Radimir Koch
Even though the character is renamed Sylvie Russo, her arc is one of the least fictionalized in the film — a scene where she challenges Dylan on his name change and secrecy matches Rotolo’s accounts in her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Dylan personally added a line to the screenplay for his character during one of their fights. “It was something like, ‘Don’t even bother coming back,’” Fanning says. “We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something — or regretting something that he said to her.” (In the film, Russo laments the idea of returning from a European trip to “live with a mysterious minstrel,” and Dylan, whose first album flopped, retorts: “Mysterious minstrels sell more than a thousand records. Maybe you just don’t come back at all.”)
Fanning’s deeply felt performance keeps the Dylan-Russo relationship at the emotional core of the film, complete with a gorgeous farewell-through-a-fence scene that seems destined for a future magic-of-movies montage. The sequence, in which Dylan lights two cigarettes between his lips and hands one to Russo, nods to a famous bit in the 1942 Bette Davis classic Now, Voyager. Fanning and Chalamet each watched the movie the night before they filmed it. “Timmy cried watching the movie,” Fanning says. “I was like, ‘You cried? All right, softie!’”
Fanning herself teared up involuntarily the first time she heard Chalamet sing on set. “We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists,” she recalls. “Jim would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.” Afterward, she heard some of the extras debating whether Chalamet was lip-synching. “I tapped them on the shoulder and I was like, ‘He is singing. I know he’s singing!’”
B efore the shoot, Fanning was warned that Chalamet would “keep to himself” on set, except with her. They already knew each other well after playing a couple in 2019’s A Rainy Day in New York, and staying close also suited their characters’ relationship. Monica Barbaro, whose Joan Baez has a spikier, more contentious fling with Dylan — “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” she tells him in one postcoital scene — didn’t meet Chalamet until a week before production began. When she did, he was already dressed in Dylan’s clothes. “I had a lot of friends,” Barbaro says, “who were like, ‘Have you met him yet? Have you met him?’ But it just felt like the right thing to wait and just meet in the context of these characters … the way she saw Bob.”
Vest by Celine. Yankees Hat by New Era
Barbaro, who played the only elite female fighter pilot in Top Gun: Maverick, emphasizes that Chalamet wasn’t so Method that she had to call him “Bob” (though Mangold says sometimes he chose to). “It wasn’t so full-on,” she says, laughing. “It wasn’t ‘Don’t look him in the eye’ or anything like that. We said hi, gave each other a hug. I was like, ‘I just saw Dune!’”
But on set, Chalamet did stay “in his own world,” Barbaro says, “in a way that I think Bob often was as well. And it was actually really conducive to the dynamic between Bob and Joan.” Once, when the two actors started chatting as themselves between takes, Mangold noted that Chalamet’s Dylan voice was slipping. “And at that point,” Barbaro adds, “I think we both were just like, ‘Nope, no more talking!’”
Chalamet did a lot of that kind of thing, trying to keep his headspace clear. “He was relentless,” says Norton. “No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people. And I agreed totally — it was like, we cannot have a fucking audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
“I related to the idea that my talent is my talent. The thing you gotta say is the thing you gotta say.”
Chalamet says he learned how to set a tone on set from his former co-stars. “The great actors I’ve worked with, Christian Bale on Hostiles” — Bale, in his younger days, infamously took umbrage at distractions from his work — “or Oscar Isaac on Dune, were able to do that,” he says, “and guard their process, particularly for something that’s really like a tightrope walk.” For Chalamet, part of it was an effort to erase the burdens of stardom and return to how it felt “when people aren’t curious about how you go about your work, because they don’t know who you are yet. Which is how the experience was for me on Call Me By Your Name.”
He can sound almost plaintive as he tries to make all of this understood. “It was something I would go to sleep panicked about,” he adds, “losing a moment of discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds — because I was on my phone or because of any distraction. I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him. So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!”
There was no stopping the fact that the exterior shots were plagued by amateur and professional paparazzi alike, something that’s happening just as much on Marty Supreme as it shoots in New York. It certainly threw off other cast members. “That was a lot to navigate at times,” Barbaro says, “to have a bunch of people watching, iPhones out, and be like, ‘It’s 1961. I’m walking down the street with a suitcase and no phone.’”
Chalamet doesn’t want to complain about it. “That, you can’t do anything about, truly,” he says. He likes to tell himself it’s a good thing, because it means people “care about the shit you’re working on to some degree.”
“Tuve que superar la preparación, los límites”, dice Chalamet sobre el papel. James Mangold
Fanning (izquierda) dice que escuchar a Chalamet cantar como Dylan “me dio escalofríos”. Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
También se preocupan por él, por supuesto. Desde fuera, al menos, Chalamet parece haber navegado por su fama con una elegancia inusual. Sale con Kylie Jenner, pero la mayoría de las veces en privado. Es más famoso que cualquier influencer, pero publica menos en las redes sociales que el propio Dylan últimamente. En la película, sin embargo, su Dylan se ve asediado y traumatizado por la celebridad, y la representación que hace Chalamet de la paranoia, el miedo y el aislamiento que conlleva parece notablemente real. Cuando planteo el tema, se queda en silencio durante unos buenos 20 segundos, dice que podría dar una respuesta de 45 minutos y luego se desentiende. “Simplemente no quiero usar esas palabras, ‘aislado’, ‘miedo’ y ‘paranoia'”, dice, sonando un poco paranoico. “Simplemente creo que no es la forma correcta de abordar la fortuna y la bendición que es trabajar, suenen verdaderas o no, y llamar la atención sobre ese tipo de estado de ánimo. Incluso si es válido, no es realmente un lugar al que quiero ir”.
Su juventud está completamente archivada, gracias a que creció bajo la mirada de un panóptico en línea que no perdona a nadie. Tenemos fotos de él abrazado a su novia del instituto, Lourdes Leon; una actuación en un concurso de talentos de 2012 en la que rapea como Lil’ Timmy Tim ante una audiencia cómicamente extasiada de compañeras de clase tiene más de 5 millones de visitas en YouTube. Pero una parte de él parece anhelar ser más enigmático, más parecido a Dylan. También puede que sepa que no es realmente posible, que es quizás la razón por la que hizo algo tan poco típico de Dylan: aparecer en ese concurso de imitadores. En nuestras entrevistas, oscila entre torrentes de confesiones en los que no puede evitarlo y una cautela extrema, sin mucho punto intermedio.
“Podemos identificarnos entre nosotros en el sentido de que hemos estado haciendo esto durante tanto tiempo”, dice Fanning, reflexionando sobre Chalamet y la representación que hace la película de las cargas de la fama. “La gente siente que te pertenece. ¿Cómo te vas a liberar de eso o cómo forjas tu propio camino?… ¿Diríamos que el ascenso a la fama de Timothée es igual al de Bob? Tal vez. Es todo relativamente similar, ¿verdad? Eres joven y de repente algo te golpea, y luego es como una explosión”. Se ríe. “Pero sabemos que el nombre de Timothée es realmente Timothée Chalamet, y creo que sabemos dónde creció y hemos visto fotos de su madre. Y tiene una hermana, y ¿no fue a LaGuardia” —la célebre escuela secundaria de artes escénicas de la ciudad de Nueva York— “o algo así? ¡Eso lo sabemos! No eres un misterio”.
Sudadera con capucha de Balenciaga
Chalamet aún no ha conocido ni hablado con Dylan, aunque le encantaría hacerlo. Pero Barbaro sí tuvo una charla con la Baez de la vida real. “Seguía soñando con conocerla”, dice Barbaro, sentada en un sofá del estudio en el mismo edificio del lote de 20th Century Studios donde Mangold ha estado editando la película. Necesitaba prótesis para combinar con los dientes de Baez, pero naturalmente tiene sus pómulos y aún exuda algo de la terrenalidad morena de su personaje con una chaqueta vaquera de gran tamaño sobre una falda y sandalias de cuero con punta abierta. “Y realmente no soy una persona que diga, ‘Tuve un sueño sobre eso. Debo ir a seguirla’”, dice. “Estaba tan inmersa en la investigación, y todavía sentía que faltaba algo al no acercarme a ella. Simplemente sentí que era necesario establecer una conexión”. Cuando logró hablar con Baez por teléfono, la cantante y activista le dijo que había estado esperando que Barbaro se pusiera en contacto.
Barbaro se sintió casi culpable por participar en la relegación de una artista legendaria al papel de interés amoroso, por muy ingeniosamente retratada que estuviera. “Su vida es mucho más importante que el papel que desempeñó en la vida de Bob”, dice Barbaro. “Se merece su propia película biográfica, miniserie, lo que sea”. La propia Baez ayudó a Barbaro a superarlo. “En un momento, ella dijo: ‘Estoy en mi jardín, mirando pájaros’… Yo pensé: ‘Oh, sí, no vives ni mueres por lo que esta película dice sobre ti’”. La Baez de Barbaro, fiel a la vida, se comporta como la igual de Dylan, discutiendo con él en el escenario y fuera de él. Su dinámica es lo suficientemente real como para que una escena en la que los dos íconos culturales discuten en ropa interior parezca casi transgresora, como algo que no se supone que debamos ver.
En la vida real, Dylan estaba mucho más interesado en la hermana menor de Baez, Mimi, un personaje que inevitablemente tuvo que ser eliminado de la narrativa. “No pude”, dice Mangold. “Si tienes a toda esta gente, terminas con un desfile. Digamos que el 40 por ciento de la película es música, ¿no? Ahora solo te quedan 75 minutos, incluidos los créditos, para contar la historia humana. Es increíble lo rápido que tienes que elegir lo que investigas”.
Barbaro rechazó incluso las alteraciones factuales menores, hasta el hecho de que no hay evidencia de que alguna vez hayan cantado juntos “Girl From the North Country” y la inclusión de múltiples escenas de Baez y Dylan sosteniendo guitarras dobles en duetos, cuando en realidad Baez dejaba que Dylan manejara la interpretación. “Jim dijo: ‘Me encanta esa imagen’”. O, como me dice Mangold más tarde: “No puedes hacer que sea como una entrada de Wikipedia”.
El mayor desafío de la actriz fue tratar de aproximarse a la voz de Baez, un instrumento más clásico y hermoso que el de Dylan. Barbaro apenas había cantado en público antes, y mucho menos en una película, así que estaba aterrorizada. Al igual que Chalamet, trabajó con el entrenador vocal Eric Vetro, quien entrenó a Austin Butler para interpretar a Elvis Presley. Y fue mucho menos quisquillosa con las sobregrabaciones: después de que ya vi un corte de la película, estaba a punto de hacer una pasada más en sus actuaciones, tratando de lograr el vibrato amplio de Baez justo en el punto correcto. Aun así, no espera impresionar a Baez ella misma. “Probablemente escuchará esto y dirá: ‘¡No!'”.
Durante la producción de la película, Barbaro también estaba filmando la serie de Netflix FUBAR de Arnold Schwarzenegger, donde interpreta a su hija. Resulta que Schwarzenegger es fan de Baez y su primer concierto fue una de sus actuaciones de finales de los sesenta. “Toca para mí”, le dijo, y Barbaro se encontró cantando “Don’t Think Twice” para Terminator.
“Dios me libre de perder el ritmo por ser Timmy. ¡Puedo ser Timmy por el resto de mi vida!”
Edward Norton se presentó para interpretar a Pete Seeger en el último minuto, después de que el actor elegido originalmente, Benedict Cumberbatch, tuviera que abandonar el papel. Eso le dejó apenas dos meses para prepararse para un papel que requería tanto una transformación física completa como interpretaciones del banjo, un instrumento que nunca había tocado. Mientras toma un café en un café de Malibú, California, no muy lejos de su casa, Norton dice que no tiene ganas de hablar de su proceso. “Si estoy sentado frente a una maldita cámara”, dice Norton, “y alguien me dice: ‘Cuéntame cómo aprendiste a tocar el banjo, o cómo te jodiste los dientes, o cómo te afeitaste la cabeza’ o lo que sea, te están pidiendo que expliques el truco antes de haberlo hecho… Y miras a Dylan en 1962. El tipo tiene 21 años. Y de alguna manera lo sabía entonces: no dejes que la gente entre detrás de la maldita cortina”.
Pero que quede claro que Norton se jodió los dientes de verdad, permitiendo que un dentista le hiciera algo desafortunado en la boca para asemejarse a la sonrisa torcida de Seeger. Y se afeitó la línea del pelo y trasladó sus habilidades con la guitarra al banjo lo mejor que pudo en dos meses, aunque es inevitable que haya algún truco en las partes más difíciles. Y consiguió, al igual que Chalamet con Dylan, una réplica espeluznante de la voz real de Seeger. Desde entonces se ha restaurado los dientes normales y le ha vuelto a crecer el pelo. A sus 55 años, sigue estando en forma para El club de la lucha , y la forma en que su mirada azul hielo se intensifica en una conversación apasionada resulta familiar por un par de docenas de películas.
Seeger, born in 1919, was nearly a generation older than Dylan, combining music and activism since the younger man was a toddler. (Baez told Norton that Seeger was too formal to be comfortable with hugs from his young friends, a detail Norton uses amusingly onscreen.) He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, pushed to the margins of the culture. So while the film’s Dylan and Seeger have a closer relationship than the real-life ones did, there’s no doubt that the actual Seeger was overjoyed to see Dylan reaching kids by the millions with his early protest songs. Norton shows me a photo on his phone of Seeger and Dylan sitting side by side on a trip to the South, and another where Seeger is watching Dylan perform to a huge crowd, his face alight with paternal joy.
But Dylan was, in the end, loyal mostly to his own artistic urges, rather than to any particular community or set of politics, which broke both Seeger’s and Baez’s hearts. “It turns out Dylan is in fact a musical artist, not a political figure,” Norton says. “Pete Seeger’s integrity is totally different from Dylan’s integrity, and when they parted ways, neither fundamentally reduces the other.” Norton clearly put something of Bruce Springsteen, his friend of 30 years and a Seeger disciple, into his performance, in the glimpses of flintiness he shows behind the public face of affability.
The final break between the two men, while Dylan was onstage with a full-on rock band at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, is one of the most mythologized and factually muddled moments in Sixties musical history — always presented as the actual “gone electric” moment, even though Dylan had a rock band in the studio with him as early as 1962’s “Mixed-Up Confusion,” as well as half of Bringing It All Back Home, released four months before Newport. Not to mention that “Like a Rolling Stone” was already charting at the time of the festival. But the crowd, at least part of it, did boo him. And at least in the most archetypal version of the story — which the movie leans into, hard — Seeger was deeply offended by Dylan’s decision to drown out his own lyrics, and violate the festival’s communal, rootsy spirit with raucous noise.
“Every single person I talked to who was there, like literally there at the moment, said that Pete blew a gasket at a level they had rarely seen,” Norton says. Even the movie doesn’t dare include the clearly apocryphal tale that Seeger grabbed an ax to literally cut off the power, but it does nod to the fact that there were axes nearby, thanks to a work-song performance that day. And the movie attempts something even more audacious, bringing in an infamous incident, a certain shout of betrayal from the crowd, that actually happened in the U.K. a year later. “Jim wasn’t interested in doing another documentary,” Norton says. “He was interested in almost a fable.”
“You gotta not take yourself so fucking seriously. Just enjoy life.”
En cualquier caso, el propio Dylan siempre ha tenido poco interés en la verdad histórica literal. Sus propias memorias, Chronicles, son más un juego de texto posmoderno que una autobiografía real, y trabajó con Martin Scorsese para dotar al documental Rolling Thunder Revue de 2019 de una extraordinaria cantidad de ficción. Norton, que ha intercambiado mensajes de texto con Thom Yorke sobre lo “punk rock” que son las actuaciones de Dylan en esa película, lo encuentra todo hilarante y compara a Dylan con el “embaucador mitológico”. “Es un alborotador”, dice, señalando el “obvio placer del cantante por la ofuscación y la distorsión”.
Norton dice que Mangold le dijo que Dylan insistió en incluir al menos un momento totalmente inexacto (no revela cuál) en A Complete Unknown. Cuando el director expresó cierta preocupación por la reacción del público, según cuenta Norton, Dylan lo miró fijamente. “¿Qué te importa lo que piensen los demás?”, preguntó.
Chalamet y yo nos dirigimos hacia la orilla del río Hudson, justo al lado del complejo deportivo cubierto Chelsea Piers. Nos sentamos uno al lado del otro en un banco, frente a un vasto horizonte sin sol, cubierto de niebla gris. Es entonces cuando empezamos a hablar del destino. Su estancia en el estado natal de Dylan, dice Chalamet, le recordó sus visitas al interior de Francia. “Mi padre creció en el Minnesota de Francia, se podría decir”, dice, hablando rápido, con urgencia. “Así que yo pasaba los veranos en esa región y me sentía exactamente de la misma manera. Te sientes encajonado y sientes que tienes algo más que decir”.
Chaqueta de Celine
“Me sentí identificado con eso profundamente en mi propia vida, en mi propia carrera”, continúa. Se sentía orientado hacia un futuro particular, pero también que podía desviarse fácilmente de su rumbo. “Si quieres que Dios se ría de tus planes, dilos en voz alta”. Al principio de mi carrera, incluso amigos cercanos podían decir algo que te dejaba perplejo durante una semana. Y luego, con determinación, tenías que ponerte en un cierto camino. Nunca cambié mi nombre, pero lo entendía. Lo sentía en mi interior de alguna manera”. ¿Por qué Robert Zimmerman necesitaría convertirse en Bob Dylan? Puede que te mires al espejo, sugiere Chalamet, y te des cuenta de que tu nombre no refleja “la seriedad de lo que sientes por dentro”.
Cuando menciono la extraña cantidad de paralelismos entre Paul Atreides, Bob Dylan y tal vez incluso él mismo (todo el asunto del Elegido, Lisan al Gaib, el destino mesiánico), Chalamet considera la idea muy en serio. “La enorme diferencia en el encuadre es que, para Paul Atreides, el destino está predeterminado y es parte de su resentimiento por su estatus. Siente que no tiene nada que ver con él, en cierto sentido. Y es una gran fuente de tensión existencial. Y para Bob, es la alegría traviesa de saber que, sí, tu talento, tu habilidad especial es obra tuya, tu propio don de Dios en cierto sentido. Creo que probablemente siempre haya un orgullo en eso para él”. ¿Y por qué Chalamet se siente atraído por estos papeles de salvador? Se ríe, finalmente. “Oye, hombre”, dice, “ellos me están encontrando a mí. No al revés”.
Durante la secundaria, sentía que tenía que esquivar “las drogas y el alcohol por todas partes”. “Sentía que tenía una pequeña joya que tenía que proteger, un potencial o algo así”. Comienza a hablar de nuevo sobre algo más que comparte con Dylan: esa explosión de fama que provocaba vértigo cuando apenas habían salido de la adolescencia. “Es una mierda a esa edad”, dice. “Realmente lo es”. Pero rápidamente cambia de tema.
Dylan, por supuesto, se partió de risa poco después de los acontecimientos de la película, y se cayó de su motocicleta para quedar en semiaislamiento en Woodstock, Nueva York. Chalamet admite que su tiempo libre por la pandemia, que incluyó su propia estadía en esa ciudad del norte del estado de Nueva York, cumplió la misma función. Fue una “mirada impuesta en el espejo, después de la honda, y sentir que, ‘OK, aquí es donde estoy’”, dice. “Pero igualmente, puedes mirarte en ese espejo demasiado tiempo y crear una rutina que a veces no existe”. La fama puede aumentar ese peligro: “Con la atención o lo que sea, es como si tuvieras que ser extremadamente cuidadoso”. Respira profundamente. “Y también no tomarte a ti mismo tan jodidamente en serio. Simplemente disfruta de la vida”.
Me dijo más de una vez que era plenamente consciente de que nunca volvería a interpretar a Bob Dylan, que el “papel de su vida” había terminado. Pero le señalo que eso simplemente no es cierto: es lo suficientemente joven como para que pueda repetir el papel fácilmente en algún momento posterior de su vida y la de Dylan.
—Oh, Dios mío —dice—. Sí. Nunca había tenido esa idea, pero tienes razón. Si alguien alguna vez se la mereció, en lo que respecta a cambiar de forma, Rolling Thunder Revue, Born-Again y Time Out of Mind … —Se ilumina—. ¡Es una idea interesante!
