See Timothée Chalamet transform into Bob Dylan

By Leah Asmelash, CNN

(CNN) — After multiple delays in production, the new Bob Dylan biopic has started filming — which means a first look at actor Timothée Chalamet as the legendary folk singer.

Costumed in an army-green jacket and a newsboy cap, Chalamet was pictured filming “A Complete Unknown,” a movie chronicling the singer-songwriter’s career beginnings, in New York this weekend, setting off a stream of both excitement and jokes among fans.

“He looks like he’s going to Camp Rock,” one X user quipped, referencing a Disney movie about a musical summer camp.

“This is not Bob Dylan, it’s simply every man who has ever tried to talk to me about Bob Dylan,” wrote author Marissa R. Moss.

Others joked that Chalamet looked like Fievel, the animated mouse in “An American Tail.”

After first being announced in 2020, production for “A Complete Unknown” experienced numerous lags, from the pandemic to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Still, the movie has retained complete support from Dylan himself, who gave director James Mangold detailed annotated notes on the script.

“I’ve spent several wonderfully charming days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him,” Mangold said last year. “He loves movies.”

The movie isn’t really a Dylan biopic, Mangold has said, and is instead more focused on a moment in the singer’s life.

“It’s a kind of an ensemble piece about this moment in time, the early ’60s in New York, and this 17-year-old kid with $16 in his pockets hitchhikes his way to New York to meet Woody Guthrie who is in the hospital,” Mangold said.

Chalamet will be doing his own singing in the movie and has hired the same vocal and dialect coaches that worked with Austin Butler in “Elvis.”

Dylan has been notoriously elusive, and his life and career have been the subject of multiple movies. One, 2007’s “I’m Not There,” directed by Todd Haynes, cast six different actors as Dylan’s multiple personas. Martin Scorsese made a concert film in 2019 called “Rolling Thunder Revue,” chronicling Dylan’s 1975 tour of the same name.

“A Complete Unknown” does not yet have a release date.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.