When The Celebrity Is Too Big For The Performance

Timothée Chalamet’s gargantuan fame eclipses his portrayal of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.” But that’s only one of the many problems the film has.

On the heels of a massive Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City, an event so popular that even the actor showed up, audiences are tasked with what is now the impossible: believing that he is a virtually obscure artist with a complex relationship with fame.

That’s what writer-director James Mangold’s new film “A Complete Unknown” banks on. In it, Chalamet portrays a 20-something-year-old Bob Dylan beginning in the early 1960s, a time when the musician was performing small, folky gigs at pubs in The Big Apple simultaneously with his guitar and harmonica — just a few short years before he became a legend.

It sort of makes sense that Chalamet would play this role. Despite being only 28 years old, he hasn’t gone 12 months in the last decade without starring in a movie, achieving multiple Oscar nominations and obviously building a rabid, largely Gen Z fanbase in the process. But he hasn’t actually won an Oscar. And save for one or two films such as 2018’s “Beautiful Boy,” he hasn’t much portrayed real-life people, which has historically been like catnip for award voters.

With “A Complete Unknown,” he does a few things the Academy just loves — portray an actual person, cater to an older audience that more closely resembles the voters and engage with the (particularly white) Dylan obsessives. Whether awards motivate the actor or not, it’s acutely clear from the media frenzy around this movie (more on that in a bit) that that is what the studio is interested in and what so much of the press around it help validate.

That seems to be working so far by the looks of the multiple nominations from committees including the Golden Globes. But that isn’t always a good indicator of the quality of the performance. In the case of “A Complete Unknown,” Chalamet has gotten so famous at this point in his career that that overshadows any potential he might have in it.