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Timothee Chalamet Channels Young Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown'

FILE PHOTO: Timothee Chalamet attends a premiere of the film "A Complete Unknown" at Dolby theater in Los Angeles, California, US December 10, 2024. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Timothee Chalamet attends a premiere of the film "A Complete Unknown" at Dolby theater in Los Angeles, California, US December 10, 2024. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
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Timothee Chalamet Channels Young Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown'

FILE PHOTO: Timothee Chalamet attends a premiere of the film "A Complete Unknown" at Dolby theater in Los Angeles, California, US December 10, 2024. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Timothee Chalamet attends a premiere of the film "A Complete Unknown" at Dolby theater in Los Angeles, California, US December 10, 2024. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo

Timothee Chalamet likened his journey to playing music legend Bob Dylan to an athletic feat. It turned into a marathon that stretched longer than the actor had expected.
Chalamet signed up to play Dylan in 2019. Then came a global pandemic and labor strikes in Hollywood, forcing two extended delays to filming.
"A Complete Unknown," the movie about Dylan's quick rise to stardom in the early 1960s, will finally be released in theaters on Wednesday, Christmas Day, by Walt Disney's Searchlight Pictures.
The disruptions gave the "Dune" actor more time to work out how to translate the towering figure to the big screen. Chalamet learned to play guitar and harmonica and worked with a vocal coach to evolve from his smooth "Wonka" singing to Dylan's distinctive, nasal voice, Reuters reported.
"It was the most I've ever taken on," Chalamet said in an interview, comparing the preparation to "the climbing of a steep hill."
"A Complete Unknown" chronicles Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 at age 19, his rapid ascent in folk music circles with songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind," and his divisive turn to electric rock music in 1965. The movie's title is taken from a line in the Dylan hit "Like a Rolling Stone."
Chalamet said he immersed himself in whatever video he could find of Dylan in the early '60s, a time of political and social upheaval in the United States.
"There's a finite amount of material available, especially in this period," Chalamet said. "At some point you can turn every page over. Not to say that I have, but if I haven't I've come damn close to it."
In the summer of 2023, Chalamet said, "I felt like I hit a runner's high" in the preparation.
"I felt like my muscles were strong and I was well prepared, and that every day was sort of just chipping away slowly at this bigger thing," he said.
Just as Chalamet was ready, Hollywood actors went on strike, and he worried that funding or casting might fall apart. The final go-ahead to start filming came in March 2024.
DYLAN WEIGHS IN
The real-life Dylan provided input on the script to director James Mangold but never met or spoke with Chalamet, though he recently described the star as "a brilliant actor."
"I'm sure he's going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me," Dylan wrote on social media platform X.
Chalamet's performance has earned praise from critics and predictions that he could garner his second Oscar nomination. He and co-star Edward Norton were nominated for Golden Globes.
Other co-stars include Elle Fanning, who plays girlfriend Suze Rotolo who appeared on the cover of the album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" but goes by the name Sylvie Russo in the film.
Monica Barbaro portrays singer Joan Baez, who had already landed on the cover of Time magazine when her career intersected with Dylan's. At the time, Baez was trying to figure out how to use her platform as an activist.
"Bob came in and was kind of a mess of a boy, but also an absolute poet and brilliant lyricist, and was putting words to all of these things that she felt," Barbaro said. "On top of his charisma, I think, she just was sort of magnetized to him."
Norton plays Pete Seeger, a banjo player and prominent singer of protest music who mentored Dylan.
"I think a lot of people have lost sight of who these people actually were and what they did and what they sounded like," Norton said. "If we can get some people tuning in again, that's probably worth the whole enterprise."
Chalamet agreed.
Dylan is "one of these names that is iconic to my generation," the 28-year-old said. "You know the name, but because he's such an elusive figure and a reclusive figure ... a lot of people my age don't know the music."
"This felt like an opportunity to be a bridge in some way and bring life to this amazing period," he added.

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Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans 'the Enemies of Peace'

Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
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Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans 'the Enemies of Peace'

Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

A T-shirt worn by Beyoncé during a Juneteenth performance on her “Cowboy Carter” tour has sparked a discussion over how Americans frame their history and caused a wave of criticism for the Houston-born superstar.

The T-shirt worn during a concert in Paris featured images of the Buffalo Soldiers, who belonged to Black US Army units active during the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the back was a lengthy description of the soldiers that included

“Their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.”

Images of the shirt and videos of the performance are also featured on Beyoncé’s website, The Associated Press reported.

As she prepares to return to the US for performances in her hometown this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers took to social media to criticize Beyoncé for framing Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries as anything but the victims of American imperialism and promoting anti-Indigenous language.

A publicist for Beyoncé did not respond to requests for comment.

Who were the Buffalo Soldiers? The Buffalo Soldiers served in six military units created after the Civil War in 1866. They were comprised formerly enslaved men, freemen, and Black Civil War soldiers and fought in hundreds of conflicts — including in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II — until they were disbanded in 1951.

As the quote on Beyoncé’s shirt notes, they also fought numerous battles against Indigenous peoples as part of the US Army's campaign of violence and land theft during the country's westward expansion.

Some historians say the moniker “Buffalo Soldiers” was bestowed by the tribes who admired the bravery and tenacity of the fighters, but that might be more legend than fact. “At the end of the day, we really don’t have that kind of information,” said Cale Carter, director of exhibitions at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.

Carter and other museum staff said that, only in the past few years, the museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the battles the Buffalo Soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. They, much like many other museums across the country, are hoping to add more nuance to the framing of American history and be more respectful of the ways they have caused harm to Indigenous communities.

“We romanticize the Western frontier,” he said. “The early stories that talked about the Buffalo Soldiers were impacted by a lot of those factors. So you really didn’t see a changing in that narrative until recently.”

There has often been a lack of diverse voices discussing the way Buffalo Soldiers history is framed, said Michelle Tovar, the museum's director of education. The current political climate has put enormous pressure on schools, including those in Texas, to avoid honest discussions about American history, she said.

“Right now, in this area, we are getting push back from a lot of school districts in which we can’t go and teach this history," Tovar said. "We are a museum where we can at least be a hub, where we can invite the community regardless of what districts say, invite them to learn it and do what we can do the outreach to continue to teach honest history.”

Historians scrutinize reclamation motive Beyoncé's recent album “Act II: Cowboy Carter” has played on a kind of American iconography, which many see as her way of subverting the country music genre's adjacency to whiteness and reclaiming the cowboy aesthetic for Black Americans. Last year, she became the first Black woman ever to top Billboard's country music chart, and “Cowboy Carter” won her the top prize at the 2025 Grammy Awards, album of the year.

“The Buffalo Soldiers play this major role in the Black ownership of the American West,” said Tad Stoermer, a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In my view, (Beyoncé is) well aware of the role that these images play. This is the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour for crying out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire piece is situated in this layered narrative.”

But Stoermer also points out that the Buffalo Soldier have been framed in the American story in a way that also plays into the myths of American nationalism.

As Beyoncé’s use of Buffalo Soldiers imagery implies, Black Americans also use their story to claim agency over their role in the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, a historian, author and professor at Pittsburgh University who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to present day.

“That’s the category in which she thought maybe she was coming into this conversation, but the Buffalo Soldiers are even a step above that because they were literally involved in not just the settlement of the West but of genocide in a sense,” she said.

Online backlash builds ahead of Houston shows Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or call the language on her shirt anti-Indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt,” indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000, asked in a post Thursday.
Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt.

“The Buffalo Soldiers are an interesting historical moment to look at. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in their operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said Chisom Okorafor, who posts on TikTok under the handle @confirmedsomaya.

Okorafor said there is no “progressive” way to reclaim America's history of empire building in the West, and that Beyoncé’s use of Western symbolism sends a problematic message.

“Which is that Black people too can engage in American nationalism," she said. "Black people too can profit from the atrocities of American empire. It is a message that tells you to abandon immigrants, Indigenous people, and people who live outside of the United States. It is a message that tells you not only is it a virtue to have been born in this country but the longer your line extends in this country the more virtuous you are.”