First things first, I do not hate Timothée Chalamet. I’ve watched everything he’s been in this decade and liked him in plenty of things. He absolutely fits as a pretentious French student in The French Dispatch, his Laurie in Little Women (2019) perfectly treads the line between annoying and charming. I even think he’s really fun in Don’t Look Up, an otherwise absolutely atrocious film. He is not a bad actor but his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown is not one that really warrants awards attention.
At time of writing, Chalamet is firmly in contention to win the most coveted prize in acting at the 2025 Oscars. He just won Best Actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and predictions are that the Oscar competition is a two horse race between him and Adrien Brody for The Brutalist. His press tour for the film has not slowed down, doing interview after interview, public appearance after public appearance, fixing him at the front and centre of the minds of awards voters, and the wider public.
The way that he’s been positioning himself on this press tour is interesting. Him and his team seem to be dead-set on proving that his performance as Dylan is authentic. Something deeply felt and researched. Of course this has led to the same types of claims that biopic performances often bring – about the length of time he spent preparing for the role. This includes working with vocal coaches and movement coaches to walk and talk like Dylan but the height of it all has to be that he spent five years working with a harmonica coach.
Learning the harmonica makes sense and him playing it in film rings true, but five years? You’d hope after a couple of years most people would be pretty damn good at the harmonica. Timmy learning for five years isn’t impressive, it just makes you think he’s bad at the harmonica.
Again, interviews have yielded the same results that they often do when asking actors about the real people they’re playing on film. While he’s not quite claiming to be communicating with Marylin Monroe’s ghost, there’s lots of talk from Chalamet about how he felt close to Dylan through this.
At the New York premiere of the film, he literally showed up in Bob Dylan cosplay, replicating Dylan’s 2003 Sundance look right down to the dyed blond hair. Being able to perform like him isn’t enough, he literally wants to be viewed as a stand in for Dylan.
Where he’s been choosing to go on this press tour is particularly interesting. Two of the longest, most detailed interviews he’s given on this tour include one with Zane Lowe of Apple music and a cover story in Rolling Stone. Neither typically cover actors; he is one of only 5 actors to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone this decade. There is a clear effort to be viewed as authentic in music spaces here to even more closely align himself with Dylan.
One of the biggest, and most revealing, stops on his press tour was his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live where he did double duty as both host and musical guest. This isn’t too uncommon, but it is for someone who has no musical career. Timmy performed his three favourite Dylan songs on the show, Outlaw Blues, Three Angels, and Tomorrow is a Long Time. The choice to pick these songs, far from Dylan’s biggest hits, portrays Chalamet as a Dylan devotee. It shows off how much he knows his stuff, how impressive his Dylan credentials are. He doesn’t perform the songs as Dylan, but he might as well be at times, adopting the voice he does in the film, especially for Tomorrow is a Long Time.
His opening monologue focusses on his Oscar nomination. The joke here is that he keeps losing awards, a montage playing of him looking disappointed at awards shows. It sets him up as an underdog of sorts, someone who just keeps being overlooked. Except he doesn’t. He’s only been nominated once for an Oscar, in 2018 for Call Me By Your Name. All the clips shown are from that one year. It’s hard to be the perpetual loser of awards if you haven’t actually been nominated for any, but placing himself as such is a great campaign move.
The man who did win in 2018 was Gary Oldman for his portrayal of Churchill in The Darkest Hour. Most of the press around Oldman then was his authenticity, how much he prepared for the role. His performance isn’t really what got him the award- more that he was willing to wear old person makeup for a long time and that makes it authentic. This kind of Oscar win is hardly rare but Oldman makes for a very neat example.
It’s perhaps no wonder then that this is what’s being pushed and pushed about Chalamet. But that doesn’t make it a good argument for why he should win. More widely speaking, rewarding this kind of performance is incredibly stale and takes away from people who are just doing a good job and getting on with it. But in a narrower case, the authenticity angle just doesn’t work for the character.
Even in A Complete Unknown there is a recognition of Bob Dylan as a man for whom authenticity just doesn’t matter. There is a whole sequence about his girlfriend confronting him for completely lying about where he’s from and his family history, something Dylan just waves off as unimportant. While the film frustratingly doesn’t pursue this idea, it makes clear that there isn’t really an ‘authentic’ Dylan.
There has been another Oscar nominated performance portraying Dylan. Cate Blanchett was nominated for Todd Haynes’ 2007 Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, a film that takes the absolute inverse approach to what I’ve talked about. In that film, Dylan is played by six different actors, each playing a different version or aspect of Dylan. The film is a far more interesting take on the subject than A Complete Unknown, and most of that is due to how it explores the mythmaking and constant reinvention that circles Bob Dylan. Just the fact that Cate Blanchett is one of the actors playing him (and doing a phenomenal job of it) is enough to indicate that the film is not interested in being authentic, because, as I’m Not There tells us, neither was Dylan.
Even the other actors in A Complete Unknown aren’t going as hard on the mimicry angle as Chalamet. Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez also got oscar nominations. Neither try to look identical or sound identical to the people they’re playing, and it works. They end up shining brighter than Chalamet because they bring something extra to their characters outside of an accurate impression.
In terms of his Best Actor competition, Chalamet stands out by far as the one playing on all these particular tropes. Even Sebastian Stan, who is nominated for his surprisingly great performance as Donald Trump, hasn’t had much fanfare about what he did to embody the role. In fact what makes that performance work is that he so clearly isn’t trying to just do a Trump impression. The rest of the bunch are all excellent performances. Colman Domingo is stellar in the criminally underseen Sing Sing and I’ve already sung the praises of Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. Ralph Fiennes probably won’t win for Conclave despite how compelling that performance is, and the fact is that he actually does have the status of someone great who’s somehow never won an Oscar that Chalamet’s tried to claim for himself.
All this to say, Timothée Chalamet should not win Best Actor at the Oscars this year despite how hard he is campaigning for it. He might just win – the Academy voters seem to love this type of thing and also will like the fact that they know who Bob Dylan is – but he shouldn’t. The obsession with authenticity and showing off your actor credentials this way does not equal quality. I’m sure Chalamet will get an Oscar one day, he is showing no signs of slowing down and he is one of the only certified film stars of this generation, but I really hope it isn’t for this.
