Timothée Chalamet shares track that sold Oscar Isaac on his Bob Dylan biopic

Earlier this week, Bob Dylan said that Timothée Chalamet is “a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me.” Audiences will have to wait to see if that’s true when the film comes out on December 25, but you can form something of an opinion now with these two new Chalamet-as-Dylan covers. “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Girl From The North Country,” the latter featuring Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez were released today ahead of A Complete Unknown (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), which will reportedly get a vinyl release in January, per Pitchfork.  

In a statement accompanying the new songs, director James Mangold said, “To me, there was only one way to make this film—to cast actors that are profoundly talented, ambitious (and brave enough!) to inhabit the whole of the artists they would portray. And in order to inhabit that world those artists had to be able to sing the songs. We were never out to replace the power, beauty and majesty of what exists, but rather, to celebrate it.”

“Girl From The North Country” happens to be the song Chalamet sang that convinced his Dune castmates he was the right man for the job. “[To] hear this kid, who had just started learning the guitar, who hadn’t done much singing, and who wasn’t all that familiar with Dylan’s music, approach these songs not as if he was learning something new but remembering something he’d already known, just rediscovering… The three of us just sat there watching this young man connect with something mysterious,” Oscar Isaac recalled at a recent event. Mangold, meanwhile, told Deadline that Dylan’s team and the film’s producers were hesitant about using Chalamet’s actual vocals (rather than recordings of Dylan himself) for the soundtrack. 

The director, however, was insistent that Chalamet should sing himself, or he’d “seem like he’s a ventriloquist dummy.” Further, he argued that “the great danger is that the songs come, the movie stops, and then the songs sing. You learn it making action pictures, which are no different from musicals in a way that the story has to be advancing in the action and the story has to be advancing in the song.” You can check out the new tunes below.