In preparing for his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet went above and beyond to capture the spirit of Dylan’s musicality. The actor learned to play and sing over 40 Bob Dylan songs, perfecting Dylan’s early singing style as well as his way of playing guitar, harmonica, and piano. Chalamet got to know Dylan’s discography inside out, obsessively poring over the albums The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Bringing It All Back Home in particular. The latter LP is Chalamet’s favorite Dylan record, which is also a popular choice among longtime fans of the singer.

Timothée Chalamet’s favorite individual Bob Dylan compositions are a little harder to pin down, as the actor’s specific song tastes are more eclectic than his general preference for Dylan’s music from the period in which his portrayal of the singer-songwriter is set. Nevertheless, some of Chalamet’s best awards season moments from 2024 and 2025 provide definitive insights into which Dylan songs Chalamet loves the most. They span the entirety of Bob Dylan’s first decade as a recording artist and include some deeper cuts that are often overlooked by more casual Dylan fans.

6

“Song To Woody”

1962

Unsurprisingly, the song that produces one of the most powerful moments in A Complete Unknown is among Timothée Chalamet’s favorite Bob Dylan compositions. The movie’s fictionalized version of Dylan’s first visit to Woody Guthrie’s room in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital sees Chalamet perform a moving rendition of “Song To Woody” to an audience of Scoot McNairy’s Guthrie and Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger.

Guthrie later gives his harmonica to Chalamet’s Dylan in recognition of the honor his protege has bestowed on him. “Song to Woody” is the earliest Bob Dylan composition included on one of Dylan’s studio albums, and it encapsulates the overwhelming influence that Guthrie’s music and personal story had on the musician as a teenager. In an Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe, Timothée Chalamet called it “one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs ever”.

The piece was the first one Chalamet performed while shooting A Complete Unknown. The intensity of performing a song that meant so much to him took its emotional toll, with the actor admitting he “went home and wept” after the shoot was completed.

5

“Tomorrow Is A Long Time”

1963

“Tomorrow Is a Long Time” doesn’t feature in A Complete Unknown, and is one of Bob Dylan’s lesser-known compositions from the 1960s. A hidden gem that had already been bootlegged before it mysteriously turned up on Dylan’s 1971 compilation album Greatest Hits Vol. II, the singer wrote the piece during his Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan days while pining for his absent girlfriend Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo and played by Elle Fanning in A Complete Unknown). He played it live at New York’s Town Hall in 1963, which was the version of the song released eight years later.

Timothée Chalamet performed the ballad while on Saturday Night Live hosting duties on January 26, 2025, as one of the Dylan songs he counted among his favorites. Each of the three songs Chalamet played on SNL was specifically chosen by the actor because of his personal attachment to them.

4

“Outlaw Blues”

1965

The second of Chalamet’s three Dylan favorites that he performed on SNL in chronological order of their release dates is “Outlaw Blues”, a rollicking, uptempo electric number from the actor’s favorite Bob Dylan album, Bringing It All Back Home. Chalamet was clearly having a blast in his off-the-wall live performance of the song, reflecting the spirit in which it was originally recorded in January 1965. He’d already confirmed it as one of his favorite Dylan tracks a month earlier, in an interview with Uproxx.

“Outlaw Blues” lends itself to raw, hard-edged rock and roll, as The White Stripes proved with a stripped-back live iteration of the track during their Elephant tour back in 2003. It’s an unusual choice for a favorite Bob Dylan song, however, which will have endeared Timothée Chalamet to a lot of the musician’s fans.

3

“It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

1965

On the other hand, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, also from the 1965 LP Bringing It All Back Home, is a far more common favorite song among Bob Dylan fans. Widely regarded as having one of the greatest lyrics in modern music history, the song contains many of Dylan’s most famous poetic aphorisms, from “Money doesn’t talk, it swears,” to “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

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Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan is seen composing the latter line of the song in A Complete Unknown, during a midnight visit to Joan Baez’s room in H๏τel Chelsea. Yet the actor had already developed an obsession with the song long before shooting this scene, as he tweeted the same aphorism without context on Twitter (now X) back in August 2020.

2

“Ballad Of A Thin Man”

1965

“Ballad of a Thin Man” is another Bob Dylan composition generally considered to be a masterpiece. The song is the ultimate riposte to Dylan’s media acolytes and critics alike, and its snarling acidity is what first drew Timothée Chalamet into the world of Dylan’s music.

In his interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Chalamet described how the live version of “Ballad of a Thin Man” that features in Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary movie No Direction Home was his “way in” to the entire sound palette required to perform as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. The actor was apparently impressed with Dylan’s scathing atтιтude towards outsiders who didn’t get his art, too, and the musician’s insistence on letting his work speak for itself. Few, if any, Bob Dylan compositions epitomize this sentiment better than “Ballad of a Thin Man”.

1

“Three Angels”

1970

The lightest track among Timothée Chalamet’s favorite Bob Dylan songs, “Three Angels” features spoken-word verses over gently cascading guitar licks and organ chords, as a choir swells to a crescendo in the background. It’s the kind of left-field pick we might expect from Chalamet, but he did it justice with a sincere and slightly bombastic performance of the song on SNL.

Out of all Chalamet’s choices, this one demonstrates just how much Bob Dylan the actor was listening to just the making of A Complete Unknown. Not content with absorbing the music of the early Dylan he was playing, he went even deeper into the artist’s back catalog and gave pieces of music that might otherwise have been forgotten by time their moment in the limelight.

Sources: Apple Music; Uproxx