The film, about the legendary singer's move from folk ballads to rock, is generating Oscar buzz for the actor

In a Dec. 4 post on the social media platform X, Bob Dylan expressed his admiration for "brilliant actor" Timothée Chalamet, who happens to be starring in A Complete Unknown, the new film that chronicles the music legend’s career from 1961 to 1965 — the blazing period in which he went from establishing himself as the great hope of the American folk scene to breaking free and “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.

However, Dylan has a way of phrasing himself in a way that can be teasingly hard to pin down. Chalamet, he wrote, is “going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.” But why “going to be” instead of “is”? Because Dylan, in fact, hadn't seen the movie at the time he posted about it.

But perhaps there's no rush — this, after all, is the man who kept the Nobel Committee waiting for months before he finally arrived in Stockholm to accept his award for literature. You wonder whether the committee considered giving him the Peace Prize as a further inducement to show up.

When Dylan gets around to seeing the completed film, at any rate, he'll find that his confidence in Chalamet was justified.

If Dune: Part Two suggested that Chalamet didn’t have the fire power to play a rising messiah refusing to have his will thwarted — he was more like a kid upset because he couldn't borrow his dad’s car — Unknown returns him to the kind of soft, poetic roles he does so well, even when playing a cannibal in 2022's Bones and All.

Ironically, I suppose, the young Dylan could also probably be described as a rising messiah of tremendous will, but that isn't what Chalamet, wearing an inconspicuous prosthetic nose, is up to here. What matters is his slight, slim build and his eyes, which can safely be described as moony and beautiful.

This, remember, is early Dylan, whose own eyes (as singer Joan Baez described them in "Diamonds and Rust," her sad-nostalgic ballad from 1975) "were bluer than robin's eggs."

Over time, as the world knows, Dylan aged into a gnomic enigma who, more like the figure in the famous Stephen Crane poem "In the Desert," might perhaps be found alone, devouring his own heart: “It is bitter—bitter… But I like it / Because it is bitter / And because it is my heart.” Oh, wait — that's me. At any rate, that Dylan would make for a much different movie, perhaps something more like 1978's Renaldo and Clara, the inscrutable four-hour epic he himself directed and starred in.

I was going to add that Chalamet deserves credit for his expert mimicry of Dylan’s speaking and singing voices — but, on second thought, is it that hard to do a decent Dylan impersonation? Cate Blanchett's version in 2007's I'm Not There was just as good, and wittier, and Saturday Night Live star James Austin Johnson's impersonation is phenomenal. But this matters far less than Chalamet being presented to us as a vision of the loveliest of troubadours, a figure of pure romance.

If Chalamet earns an Oscar nomination, which seems guaranteed, it will be because of his own presence and not his invocation of boy Bob.

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