Timothée Chalamet: "I'm the actor with the biggest heart and the one who works the hardest"

Special correspondent for the Berlin Film FestivalAn audience booing the musician they idolize because he dared to play the electric guitar. Many do not need any further information to identify the characters and the context of the scene: it is the concert of Bob Dylan at the Newport Festival in 1965, the day the musician staged his resignation from being the voice of a social movement and claimed his artistic freedom with the electric sound of the guitar and the verses of fury and spite of Maggie's farm. In the most purist temple of American folk, the patron saint of the new protest song came out to play with a rock band and the audience reacted first with stupor and then with tears and indignation. It was one of those moments about which piles of articles and books are written, a tectonic shift in popular culture and, all of it, a simple aesthetic choice: how an artist wants his music to sound.

Let the plot ofA complete unknown, he biopic The film, about Bob Dylan's early years in New York, is one of the many successes of James Mangold's remarkable film, which this Friday was presented alone at the Berlinale by its protagonist, Timothée Chalamet, who mesmerizes the screen with a performance permeated by the charisma, confusion and enigma of Dylan in his 1990s. Tired after spending "two months around the world talking about the film," the actor believes that he will never again live "an experience that is like it," at least as far as the preparation process is concerned.

Chalamet takes on the challenge of interpreting Dylan's songs himself with excellent results and, beyond mimicking the singer's nasal voice and vocal inflections, he plays the guitar well and leaves a handful of memorable interpretations, from a nude Song for Guthrie to the abrasive It's not me, babe which he and Monica Barbaro do in two voices, a Joan Baez with fire in her eyes. Dylanologists will tire of emphasizing the many liberties he takes A complete unknown –the cry "Judas!" to which Dylan responds "And don't believe you" went to Manchester, not in Newport – but the power of the torrent of music on offer and the dramatic importance given to the songs can hardly be denied. “My preparation was not academic, but by osmosis,” Chalamet explained. “I lived with the songs day and night for five and a half years, not as an obligation or as a job, but because Bob Dylan, the artist, became my guiding light, because of his independence and refusal to be part of the noise.”

A complete unknown It is a film about an artist's rise to fame and the hardships that come with it, but also about the personal balances that those around him must make, especially when the artist in question is someone as elusive and complicated as Dylan in the sixties, "a jerk" if we pay attention to what Joan Baez tells him after receiving a comment. In the letters he writes to his admired Johnny Cash - portrayed in the film more successfully than in the unsatisfactory biopic - which Mangold himself directed - Dylan talks about the pressure of success: "It's made me struggle," he confesses. Chalamet, nominated for an Oscar for the second time at 29, is more accurate: "I don't feel that way. Being able to come to this festival with films like this or Call me by your name It makes me feel like my heart is in the right place. I'm not the most talented actor, but I'm the one with the biggest heart and the hardest working one."

Music yes, amphetamines no

Also praiseworthy is the effort to avoid the clean and polished view of the facts that most people make. biopeaks, but it is worth noting that there is not a single image of drug use in the film, although its protagonist spends the second part obviously affected by the consumption of amphetamines. Chalamet also did not want to get into embolisms and did not evaluate from a current perspective Dylan's decision to distance himself from politics at such a confusing time: "My theory is that political song was for him a texture with which to express himself in the early sixties, but once the rock ones came, it was less complicated than political activism. But it is true that while he was making records like Blonde on blonde and Nashville skyline, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger were on protest marches."

Baez, Seeger and Dylan's first love (Suze Rotolo, renamed by another fictional name at the musician's request) are all important characters in Mangold's film, which through her observes the musician's emotional neglect. Without falling into the caricature with which many chroniclers dazzled by Dylan's rebellious myth had previously portrayed them, A complete unknown He strives to give dignity and depth to the empowered and lucid Baez, and above all to Seeger (Edward Norton, excellent) who, despite not knowing how to value the importance of his friend's new musical path, was always consistent with his principles.