Chalamet as Dylan Revisited
Examining the 7 times Timmy went Zimmy from 2024–2062
Author’s Note: In a December 25, 2024 interview with Nardwuar the Human Serviette, Timothèe Chalamet remarked that he would love to continue playing Bob Dylan throughout his career. Ideally, the actor said, he would reprise the role as he ages, reflecting the singer’s many different eras. The following piece reviews the seven times Chalamet played Dylan on the big screen, starting with 2024’s A Complete Unknown, all the way through 2062’s I’m So Deep in Love That I Can Hardly See.
A Complete Unknown (2024)
In Chalamet’s first turn as Dylan, he plays the folk-singer as he explodes onto the 1960s folk scene in Manhattan. The young Dylan rises in renown and influence and generates drama by plugging in his electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Directed by James Mangold, A Complete Unknown gave Chalamet his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, which he’d go on to win twice (first for 2029’s L8ER SK8ER and later, as Dylan, in 2045’s Lamb of My Soul.) This film is especially memorable for its depictions of Greenwich Village in the 1960s and the lovely duets between Dylan and Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro, who won Best Supporting Actress for her role.
Thin Wild Mercury (2030)
Chalamet reprised his role as Dylan in this film by Coralie Fargeat that takes place entirely in 1966, a significant year for the singer. That year, he released his landmark album, Blonde on Blonde, continued collecting boos for his electric sets, married his lover, Sara Lownds (played by a delicate Rachel Zjender), and survived a near-fatal motorcycle crash. The crash, a dramatic rendering that makes up the film’s final scene, was lauded at the time for its innovative use of ImpactSync kinetics technology, although three decades later, the novelty has worn off. The film received mixed reviews upon release, mainly for Chalamet’s “unyielding boredom of expression and clear disinterest in replicating Dylan’s singing style,” as a reviewer for this publication put it at the time. This was also the film that first introduced the idea of the so-called “Lowlands Curse.” In this case, Zjendler lost her left shoulder in a ski-lift crash shortly after the premiere.
Three Angels (2038)
James Mangold returned to direct this film, which focused on the singer’s pivotal years of 1967-1975. Often called “Dylan’s domestic era,” Chalamet excels as a laid-back married man, mostly living in upstate New York, where he spends his time raising children, painting landscapes, and jamming with The Band in their Woodstock barn. The script is adapted from B.J. Zweig’s 2036 book, Three Angels: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads of Complacency, 1966-1973. Barry Koeghan steals the show as Robbie Robertson, guitarist of The Band and longtime Dylan buddy. The film was a box office hit and broke a string of Chalamet flops for most of the 2030s. The film ends with Dylan’s divorce to Sara, his wife of a decade, evocatively played by Anita Ocean. (Ocean, of course, was paralyzed from the waist down during a promotional tour shortly after the film’s release when a self-driving car burnt out its emergency brakes and plowed into her.) She won the 2039 Academy Award for Best Actress and gave a heartbreaking speech about mobility and movement from her neoglide chair, which Chalamet wheeled on stage.
Lamb of My Soul (2045)
Bob Dylan’s “Christian era” lasted from 1978 to 1981, although many scholars extend it to 1983 to include his album, Infidels. For this role, the 50-year-old Chalamet, coming off his memorable turn in Roman Mintz-Cashel’s The Thin Grey Mannequin, put on thirty pounds and spent two months in a retro-Christian monastery in preparation. The film was directed by Y Gorsetman and garnered much praise for its unique cinematography, which employed so-called “angel perspectives” during the film’s many religiously stirring moments. Chalamet won Best Actor for his piercing portrayal of a spiritually lost musician dialoguing with God, and Gorsetman was nominated for Best Director, becoming the source of subsequent controversy when he ascended the stage to claim the Oscar, even though he lost out to Georgette Coppola (for Slenderman With a Slenderplan, hands down this writer’s favorite movie of the 21st century). (Gorsetman was since banned from the Academy.) Amanda Steiner excels in the role of Mary Allen Artes, Dylan’s love interest at the time, although she had to amputate two fingers after a trolley accident while on a promotional tour. Whispers of a curse crescendoed.
Anyone Seen My Love? (2050)
Many critics consider the 1980s to be Bob Dylan’s artistic nadir. This is largely because of the music he released, which was widely panned at the time and has since aged terribly (excepting 1989’s Oh Mercy), but it was also because of his turn as an actor in Richard Marquand’s fantastically terrible Hearts of Fire in 1987. Directed by Emily Cohen and set during the making of Hearts of Fire, Anyone Seen My Love? has Chalamet as a frizzy-haired earring-wearing Dylan embodying the role of washed-up rock star Billy Parker in the film-within-a-film. The main film’s plot largely fabricates the relationship between Dylan and his on-air co-star, Fiona (played with wonderful cynicism by a delightful Penelope Madison Wulf) while centering on the movie’s production. It includes an epic scene where Dylan re-negotiates the terms of his “deal” with a shadowy horned figure at the crossroads played by Bill Skarsgård, in his final role. This is the Chalamet-Dylan film that took the most creative interpretation of the musician’s life, which was a box office pay-off. The movie was smash, taking in $568 million against a budget of $45 million. The film also broke the so-called “Lowland’s Curse.” In an interview with Paper Cut Ragazine shortly after its release, Chalamet stated "It was prophecized I’d still be playing Bobby all these years later by the man himself. I’m talking about the one time I met him. It was in a hotel. He played me a famous song he wrote in 1979, sixteen full years before I was born. We’re both here, he said. And when the last verse came on, he nodded at our names and then told me, quote, it’s a Buddy Holly thing.” This remains the only time Chalamet has gone on record about the time he met his lifelong muse. Supposedly, the two conversed at length in a New Jersey Marriott one afternoon in September 2025.
His Master’s Voice Is Calling Me (2058)
Chalamet reprised his role as Dylan in what he called at the time “my final turn as Bob.” Anette Anderson’s film opens in 2001 on the day of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York City, which was also the day Dylan released his late-stage masterpiece, Love and Theft. Largely a story of the rocker on the road during what he called “his never-ending tour,” the film touches on many of Dylan’s late-career achievements, including winning the Nobel Prize in 2016 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. (This last award is delivered in the film by a hilarious James Newsom playing then-president Barack Obama, late grandfather of current US president, Harrison Mercer). It’s a startling testament to the simplicity of cinematic achievement, since the film eschewed the popular artificial digitization technology that overwhelmed Austinwood in the 2050s in favor of analog filmmaking techniques.
I’m So Deep in Love That I Can Hardly See (2062)
The 67-year-old Chalamet played an octogenarian Dylan in this adaptation of Pirate Radio Signal: Bob Dylan in the 2020s Pre-Disappearance, written by Samuel Calder Lichtschein in 2059. The plot focuses on the singer as an old man off-the-stage and is remarkable for how well Chalamet sings the songs from Dylan’s penultimate album, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Currently in speed-theaters and available on direct-brainstem, the film was recently reviewed in this publication, by Ryan Tate, who wrote, “Not only is it inspiring to see Timothèe knock it out of the park in the role he’s spent decades embodying, it gives the viewer a sense of aging along with him. Superbly acted and finely wrought.”
One Final Film?
Chalamet recently announced that he’s coming out of retirement to reprise the role of Dylan one last time. Filmmaker A Gorsetman (daughter of Y, disgraced director of Lamb of My Soul) is in talks to direct the feature, tentatively titled I Disappear. It deals with Dylan’s mysterious 2028 “disappearance.” As every Dylan fan knows well, the singer’s death was never announced or formally acknowledged. No death certificate was ever published. After releasing his final album, 2028’s Offin’ the Hangar, Dylan’s representatives released an infamous memo that the singer had “disappeared,” citing the final words from “Unto Him I Disappear (Off in the Hangar),” the album’s last track: “I feel the touch of God is near / and unto Him I disappear.” The film’s plot is unclear, but there are rumors that Gorsetman plans to use soul emergence technology to evoke a union between Dylan and his creator.
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