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There's a moment, right at the start of the third act of A Complete Unknown, when everything shifts drastically. The mood. The music.
And, perhaps most drastically of all, the jeans. It's 1965, the year that Bob Dylan famously—and disastrously— "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival. He's recently returned from England with a new Fender Stratocaster and a revamped look.
His black sunglasses are practically glued to his face, a fixture between the wild crown of curls on his head and the smirk on his face as he writes and performs songs destined to alienate the folk purists who fostered his meteoric rise in the Greenwich Village music scene. And the denim? It's tight. Very tight.
"You see him in the Columbia studio and his hair's longer. He's got these bespoke shirts and the skinny jeans and the Chelsea boots," says Academy Award-winning costume designer Arianne Phillips, who helped transform Timothée Chalamet into a dead-ringer for early-to-mid-1960s Dylan for the movie. "And that is really the rock-and-roll archetype that we associate with Bob Dylan.
" Searchlight Pictures Chalamet's Dylan in 1965. It's also a far cry from the Dylan we see in the film's opening in 1961, when a mysterious young man with a guitar case and not much else hitchhikes his way to New York in hopes of finding his hero, Woody Guthrie. H.