Bob Dylan fans celebrate Christmas with release of ‘A Complete Unknown’
There were lines out the door and a jam-packed lobby on Christmas Day at the Landmark Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis.
“Yeah, I’m excited to see the whole thing!” smiled Francesca Miller, visiting her family from New York City. “I love Bob Dylan; my dad loves Bob Dylan; I grew up listening to him a lot.”
“I’m excited, it’s like a new take, you know,” added Jacob Fine, who grew up in south Minneapolis. “I’m always up for seeing a Dylan movie.”
They were among the crowds on hand to see the premiere of “A Complete Unknown” — the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet.
“I’m just appreciative that someone has taken the time to produce this film,” declared Miller’s father, Gerald. “I grew up with all the different people of that era, with the Beatles and everyone. To me, Bob Dylan always stood out; he was the top. I liked him more than all of them.”
The movie traces Dylan’s beginnings as a professional musician in New York in the early 1960s after leaving Minnesota, until he went electric just a few years later.
“I’ve always felt a strong, personal connection,” Fine says. “We’re both Jewish kids from Minnesota. He went to the same summer camp as me. We both went to the University of Minnesota, dropped out, moved to New York City. He became a famous folk musician; I became a real estate broker.”
A screening of the film earlier in December brought Chalamet to the Twin Cities, where he waved at the crowd and posed with fans.
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“I loved it,” Chalamet told reporters about his two visits to the area. “Like I said, I love Minnesota and love the people here. It’s genuine.”
The actor traveled to Minneapolis, Duluth and Hibbing to research the role, including a visit to Dylan’s boyhood home on the Iron Range.
“I just kind of felt like it gave me sort of the energetic information for what Bob went through growing up,” he says. “This is about someone who quite quickly was very gifted and from here.”
Chalamet also learned to play guitar and sing dozens of Dylan songs.
He believes their composer was strongly influenced by his childhood and teenage years in northern Minnesota.
“I think the iron ore is in his songs, and the iron ore is in his voice,” Chalamet says. “Mounds of residue, factory residue, informed the grit in his voice in some way. It’s different if he had been raised in Hawaii or something.”
Dylan himself returned the compliment on X, calling the 28-year-old “a brilliant actor… I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”
“When I was younger, we’d just drive around the lakes and listen to his entire discography,” Francesca recalls. “So, we’re very excited to see it.”
Magnetism and music from a young musician from the Iron Range.
A complete unknown who stepped onto the world stage.
Now, at least part of Dylan’s story and his music are on the big screen.
“I think in all of the artists in the world, I think he’s clearly one of the top and most important; he’s from Minnesota,” Gerald says. “He’s a writer, too. That is so profound, all the work that he has done for himself and others as well.”