“A Complete Unknown” will be released at Christmas

A complete unknowndirector James Mangold's film about Bob Dylan's early years is hitting the ground running with its release date: It hits theaters on December 25, the key date for the Oscars. The film – which stars Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (who closely resembles Dylan's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo), Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Edward Norton as folk legend Pete Seeger – only wrapped shooting in June, but Mangold was already in the middle of editing by late July.

“It looks like a movie,” said Mangold Rolling Stone in his first in-depth interview about the film. “I love the creative momentum that comes from charging headfirst into an audience… It can be just as scary to work slowly as it can be fast. So I'm embracing it. The film is really taking shape and teaching us what it wants to be. I think we have enough time to finish that in a beautiful way.” (To hear an extended audio version of our interview, check out our Rolling Stone Music Now Podcast – go to the podcast provider of your choice here, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)

Mangold told Rolling Stone that the film – which traces Dylan's early years in New York and the journey to his legendary, electric-powered performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival – is more of an ensemble piece than a typical biopic. “It follows Bob, of course, but I'm much more interested in the mark that person left on others,” he said. “Elle's character and Pete Seeger, Edward's character and of course Joan Baez and many others are more than just passing visitors in a kind of Hall of Presidents parade. They are significant players who appear and disappear in the film. They were all instrumental in his journey in the years between 1961 and 1965, but they also all interacted with him in different ways that are prisms and keyholes into different aspects of who Bob might be.”

Chalamet's performance will show how Dylan has evolved over the course of the film's five-year story, Mangold promised. “He does an incredible job of developing the character,” he said. “Most Dylan fans don't focus on the boy in the newsboy cap who comes to town. And Timmy really develops that character from a 19-year-old boy telling stories about working at the fair to a person we recognize as an icon. Timmy finds the way to take us there. It's going to be impossible for people to tell in trailers or teasers or photos, but the way he develops that character is, I think, a real act of acting brilliance.”

Dylan himself met with Mangold over several days to discuss the film, and may have signaled his approval of Chalamet's performance of “A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall” in the first trailer by reinstating the song in his own setlist this week.