Latest A Complete Unknown trailer follows Timothée Chalamet from acoustic Bob to electric Dylan

The first full-length trailer for A Complete Unknown is largely an exercise in name (and needle) dropping, but those winks to the audience don’t diminish how fun it all is. Timothée Chalamet isn’t the only one rocking a perfect ’60s shag for James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic. In this trailer, we also spend a bit of time with Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger, and Scoot McNairy’s Woody Guthrie, all of whom seem perfectly comfortable stepping into the shoes of their respective music legends. Don’t think twice, Bob Dylan fans; it’s gonna be all right.

The new trailer, of course, also features more of Chalamet’s shockingly good Dylan pipes. This time, we get extended snippets of two of the big ones: “Girl From The North Country” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” from which the film gets its title. As the trailer illustrates, the latter song caused some real waves in the acoustic guitar community, when the then-24-year-old renegade dared to do something that would change the face of folk music forever: play electric. While it may seem like a quaint crisis now, we only have that perception because of how influential Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival truly was. 

“Well this is gonna piss some people off,” a record exec says in the room when Dylan and his band first record the song’s electric riff. Later, people in the crowd cheer and riot as a festival organizer screams at Dylan to turn it down and he voices his refusal through a harmonica. Elsewhere in the trailer, Johnny Cash points a guitar like a rifle and Bob symbolically shoves his acoustic guitar at Joan Baez and walks out the door as if to say “No, that was your dream.” Still, it doesn’t tip into anything that feels like a Walk Hard-style parody, which probably has something to do with the fact that it was directed by the guy whose Johnny Cash biopic, Walk The Line, inspired Walk Hard in the first place. 

A Complete Unknown also stars Elle Fanning as a fictionalized version of Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo, James Austin Johnson, Charlie Tahan, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz, Michael Chernus, and more. The film premieres Christmas Day.