Timothée Chalamet is a “masterful” Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. In a recent review of the movie, Vogue’s film and culture editor Radhika Seth writes: “His portrayal is an entirely committed, deep-seated, almost cellular embodiment, entirely different from anything he’s ever done before and a move which heralds the beginning of an exciting new chapter in his career as he transitions from playing floppy-haired boys to real, complicated men.” It’s a sentence which might also be read across Chalamet’s little moustache: not so much a symbol of masculine gruff as a free agent coming of age.
Last night, the actor was photographed at the Los Angeles premiere of the biopic demonstrating the fruits of his growth. Chalamet posed alongside cast mates Edward Norton, Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro in an attenuated leather jacket – encircled with several Bob Dylan pins around its breast pocket, from which the Nobel Prize winner’s signature Ray-Ban Wayfarers were also suspended – a top-buttoned shirt, slim-cut jeans and Chelsea boots. He looked like an aspirant folk-rock musician, a descendant of Cisco Houston, who Dylan himself referred to as “handsome and dashing with a pencil thin moustache,” in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume I.
I am loathe to describe this outfit as “method dressing” – a form of styling that incorporates themes and motifs drawn from a performer’s role that became fashionable during the Barbie, Dune and Challengers press tours – but it bears striking resemblance to the look Dylan began to adopt when he hit the big time. “This is when the Bob we come to know – a shy and retiring presence, observant, truthful to a fault and already mistrustful of all the baggage which seems to accompany fame – slowly begins to retreat from his adoring public,” Seth writes of the musician’s changing relationship with clothes. “As he’s mobbed by fans and cajoled by industry heavyweights, the sunglasses go on, and a new, slicker, tougher, more icy persona is constructed – a form of armour which seems essential to his survival.” I wonder if Chalamet – the darling-turned-bonafide movie star – might be doing the same.
