As soon as upon a time, Timothée Chalamet discovered to rhyme (and play guitar and converse) like Bob Dylan for the massive display outing A Full Unknown. It’s a efficiency that’s been gaining him a number of discover throughout awards season, together with a coveted 2025 Oscars nomination. However him studying to play like Bob Dylan earlier than filming was apparently a much more secretive endeavor than I might have guessed.
This info is coming to us from Larry Saltzman, a contract guitarist and session musician who additionally occurred to be employed for the coveted gig of instructing Timothèe Chalamet to jam. Nonetheless, the skilled didn’t actually even know what he was signing up for when he mentioned sure. He informed Rolling Stone that he was actually requested to signal a non-disclosure settlement earlier than the film went into manufacturing and finally hit the discharge schedule.
They didn’t inform me who it was. With these non-disclosure agreements, they don’t need folks blabbing about it. I’m not on Fb, you recognize what I imply? I’ve none of that type of stuff. After three or 4 or 5 telephone calls, they lastly mentioned ‘it’s Timothée Chalamet.’ I actually didn’t know who Timothée was. They mentioned ‘it’s Bob Dylan music.’
Mr. Saltzman was cool with that degree of knowledge on the time, telling the outlet his older sister had been an enormous Dylan fan from the very starting. That was particularly the music he’d grown up on with a cool elder sibling in the home.
Whereas unclear for a time about all of the who, what, when, the place, and why he was instructing Chalamet the way to carry out classics like “The Instances They Are A Changin’” and “Onerous Rain,” Mr. Saltzman began making a course of for breaking down the songs for the younger actor. Actually, the entire thing sounds prefer it was fairly the doozy, however one which paid off by the point James Mangold’s film hit the massive display.
My Dropbox file on that is ridiculous. My Timothée/Dylan Dropbox folder is intense. For every music, I might clearly have an MP3, after which I had this program known as Transcribe the place you would play it and you would gradual it down. That was actually useful. You might zero in on no matter you wanted to deal with. For every music, I had a Learn Me doc with totally different YouTube movies that I wished to look at, after which I might have lyrics with chords, like a folks solution to do it. I wrote issues out with most likely a number of little phrases of encouragement right here and there. Every music had its personal factor.
The music trainer ended up ordering Dylan songs by what he felt was “degree of issue” and he and Mr. Chalamet started working. They began with “Masters of Struggle,” which solely has a number of chords, and issues obtained more durable from there. The actor would go on to carry out 40 of Bob Dylan’s classics in A Full Unknown, which takes Dylan followers from his pre-fame days although his well-known electrical set on the Newport People Pageant. He did all this with out ever really assembly Dylan.
A Full Uknown critiques have been stable, and there are complete fan threads devoted to Chalamet’s efficiency within the film. One factor that’s struck me about every of them is the very fact followers can’t even agree on which Dylan basic the younger actor does greatest. There’s a lot he did that’s true to what Dylan has performed in performances, it’s fairly superb to look again and understand how a lot work was put into so many songs.
Whereas musician performances from Rami Malek and extra have been transformative, a number of instances with music biopics like this, we’d get an actor lip syncing and/or studying only one or two songs to drag of a efficiency, however A Full Unknown is all Timmy. He not too long ago gained a SAG Award for the gig, and made no bones about what he desires his Hollywood legacy to be, stating, ‘I wish to be one of many greats.’
Nobody might accuse him of not placing the work in.