Actor Timothée Chalamet, in character as Bob Dylan, crosses to the Chelsea Hotel during the filming of "A Complete Unknown."
As musical legend goes, when a 19-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York City in 1959 to pursue a career in music, he knew no one. Over the next five years, Dylan played intimate Greenwich Village venues with Joan Baez, his folk idols Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger invited him into their fold, and songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” made his name synonymous with a sincere, political, decidedly acoustic sound. He was to be the future of folk music.
That all changed when he picked up an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and strummed the opening chords to a song called “Maggie’s Farm,” shocking his fans, alienating his peers and mentors in the folk scene, and affirming the expansion of his own artistic repertoire. Dylan wasn’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. In other words, his creative impulses would not be controlled by others. He would plug in, he would experiment, and from that moment up to the present day, he would go on to make music on his own terms.
A Complete Unknown, a new Dylan biopic on which LSA alum Peter Jaysen (A.B. English/Communications, ’89) was a lead producer, focuses on those pivotal years in the musician’s long career. The film, which opens in theaters on December 25, was recently nominated for Golden Globe Awards in the categories of Best Motion Picture-Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama for star Timothée Chalamet, and Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for Edward Norton. A Complete Unknown is not the first Dylan film, but it’s the first to count Dylan himself as an executive producer.
Before signing on, Jaysen says that Dylan had questions. “Bob wanted to understand…why now, what’s different about this one from other documentaries and films?”
What’s different about A Complete Unknown, Jaysen says, is the scope of the story written by director James Mangold and his co-writer, Jay Cocks.
“Doing a biopic cradle to grave was never our intent,” Jaysen says. “It was about this moment in time. As a true artist he [Dylan] didn’t care what the masses thought, and he didn't care about offending his heroes who wanted to pass the folk torch to him. They all wanted him to be the face and leader of folk music and he wanted so much more.”
Enthused, Dylan read every line of the script, and joined the project.
Come Gather ’Round People
From the outset, the biggest challenge of the film was threading the needle of the Dylan character, Jaysen says. “While it’s easy to show who the man is to his fans and his artistry, the challenge is to show how the reaction to his artistry affected him as a person. Most geniuses are loners, not the most social people.”
Guiding this needle was the commitment of an exceptional cast. Jaysen describes how Chalamet signed on to play Dylan in January 2019, shortly after a conversation in the lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel, as pure “Hollywood magic.” Chalamet had been a Dylan fan for years, and quickly embodied the role he had long desired to play.
“Timmy is one of the most dedicated and gifted actors I’ve ever worked with,” Jaysen says. “He learned the piano parts in two weekends after a couple of lessons and some YouTube tutorials.”
In fact, all of the cast members—including Chalamet; Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez; Edward Norton as Pete Seeger; Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash—performed the music of this film. From the banjo to the harmonica, guitar, and piano, the cast played every note, and learned to emulate the voices of their characters. Their performances were so convincing, Jaysen says, that it was difficult to distinguish their recordings from the originals.
“Everything you hear is them,” Jaysen says.
Yes the Road is Long
Despite its focused script and dedicated cast, A Complete Unknown’s production did not unfold without incident. Filming shut down twice, once because of the pandemic, and then again due to industry strikes. The weather—spring snowstorms, heatwaves—did not always cooperate with shooting schedules. Jaysen says these were some of the most stressful moments of his career, but they are also the moments that bring him pride and gratitude for a team that, in his words, “pulled off the impossible.”
“My role was helping source, package, and sell it,” Jaysen says. “I was there every time we needed to do something to help make this daunting production even more efficient and feasible.” He created budgets for casting, crewing up, and shooting, secured locations and tax credits, and even battled Mother Nature to keep everyone comfortable and safe. When Disney’s product placement division was laid off during the pandemic, Jaysen stepped in and negotiated relationships with Levi’s and Anheuser-Busch.
“My view about being a non-writing producer is that you’re basically like a fireman,” he says. “I show up with my hose, ax, and oxygen. To any project I bring all my previous experience.”
And a good part of that experience began at LSA. Jaysen says LSA is where he was mentored to succeed, and where he honed the practical skills, creativity, flexible problem-solving, and resilience that served him as he weathered the hard rains of producing this film.
“Everything I had to do in this movie, I began building that foundation at LSA. As a student, I remember standing out in the Diag with a bucket, raising funds for my first film. It’s like running a marathon to work in this industry for 36 years. Being a work-study student who paid for half of my education and raised money to make my own student film helped me build the muscles I needed to persist in Hollywood.”
Bringing It All Back Home
Jaysen returns to LSA annually as a guest lecturer for the Department of Film, Television, and Media. “Returning for the guest lecture is my favorite time of year, no question,” Jaysen says. When he meets with students, he remembers his younger self, with his bucket on the Diag.
“Like them, I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but no idea of how to get there,” he says.
Part of his task now is to help students pursue a career in the film industry after graduation. He draws upon his decades of experience producing television series such as The Mosquito Coast (2021–2023) and films like the Producers Guild Award-winning Fahrenheit 451 (2018). He doesn’t sugarcoat the demands of this career path, but he believes that LSA students are academically well-positioned to face the challenges of the industry. And tenacity, he says, is key.
“If you’re going into film for fame and fortune and ego, go to Wall Street. There are no guarantees; be prepared to deal with a lot of rejection. If we develop 50 projects, we are lucky if we sell 10 of them.
“It’s a long road,” Jaysen says, “But I love the journey. I tell them to stay the course.”
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Top photo by James Mangold. Inline photo by Kaite Jones. Bottom photo by Adam Jaysen.
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