Bob Dylan Can’t Wait to See Timothée Chalamet Play Him in A Complete Unknown

Don’t think twice about Bob Dylan’s take on A Complete Unknown, the upcoming musical biopic starring Timothée Chalamet as a younger version of Dylan. The famously private musician has broken his silence on the project to say he expects that Chalamet’s performance will be more than all right.

“There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!),” Dylan wrote Wednesday, December 4, on X. “Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.” (Rest assured that this endorsement is real; Vulture confirmed the authenticity of Dylan’s tweets from this account back in October.)

The 83-year-old went on to note that the film is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric!. It’s directed by Walk the Line’s James Mangold from a script the filmmaker cowrote with Jay Cocks. “It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ’60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport,” Dylan writes, referencing the electric rock performance he gave at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965—which led to a near riotous response from avid folk music fans. “After you’ve seen the movie,” Dylan concludes, “read the book.”

A Complete Unknown follows Dylan at the advent of his career, capturing the 19-year-old Minnesotan as he moves to New York to pursue music in the early 1960s and culminating in that explosive, genre-bending festival outing. Joining Chalamet as Dylan are an array of actors portraying legendary figures from the ’60s music scene, including Monica Barbaro as folk icon and activist Joan Baez; Boyd Holbrook as country superstar Johnny Cash; Edward Norton as folk singer Pete Seeger; and Scoot McNairy as Dylan’s musical role model, Woody Guthrie. Elle Fanning also stars as Dylan’s love interest, artist and college student Sylvie Russo.

Up until this point, Dylan has remained publicly mum on the project, which is earning awards buzz ahead of its December 25 debut. Chalamet previously told GQ that he had yet to meet the artist, but was open to doing so. “I didn’t want to three years ago, because I just didn’t want to for superstitious reasons,” the Oscar-nominated actor said. “Now I would love to.”

In a more recent interview with Rolling Stone, the film’s director said that during the preproduction process, he “never even planned on meeting Bob, honestly,” adding, “That just came about because he read the script and wanted to see me.” During their initial conversation, Dylan reportedly asked the director to share the project’s synopsis. “I said, ‘It’s about a guy who’s choking to death in Minnesota, and leaves behind all his friends and family and reinvents himself in a brand-new place, makes new friends, builds a new family, becomes phenomenally successful, starts to choke to death again—and runs away,’” Mangold remembered.

Dylan apparently smiled at his answer, added Mangold, saying, “I like that.”