Timothée Chalamet performs 40 Bob Dylan songs live in A Complete Unknown: 'On guitar, on harmonica, and singing'

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me...

Timothée Chalamet, who portrays Bob Dylan in the new biopic A Complete Unknown, took Dylan's invocation quite literally. In an exclusive new featurette, producer Fred Berger reveals that Chalamet learned and performed live 40 of the folk hero turned rock star's songs.

"There are 40 songs in the movie that he performs," Berger notes. "On guitar, on harmonica, and singing live take after take after take."

"It was important for me to sing and play live," Chalamet adds. "Because if I can actually do it, why should there be an element of artifice here? And I’m proud that we took that leap."

The film, which hits theaters on Christmas Day, follows a young Bob Dylan as he rises in the 1960s folk scene in New York City after meeting his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). Other figures of this time, including Dylan's on-and-off girlfriend, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), also factor into the storytelling. Like Chalamet, each actor sang and played their own instruments.

"Boyd somehow made it his own, it feels just as authentic and true as Johnny Cash but he brings his own energy to it," the Wonka star says of Holbrook.

"Getting to learn and play the music itself was a huge hook for me," adds Norton.

In addition to charting Dylan's journey to fame and the disruption caused by his pivot to electric, the film also chronicles his romantic life and a love triangle with Baez and his pre-fame girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).

For her part, Fanning was blown away by Chalamet's commitment to live performance. "I had goosebumps," she says in the featurette. "You can see how much love and how hard he’s worked and how much he cares about getting this right."

Barbaro tells Entertainment Weekly she was similarly wowed by Chalamet. "It was really incredible to watch him perform these songs," she says. "Having done so much work on my 11 songs, knowing he had so many and learned to play and sing all of them, and the amount of work that it took me to get to where I got, knowing that he had an entire film's worth of performances, I was really amazed by how he took on each song and each performance."

The film strives for period accuracy in every way, using authentic microphones and instruments from the era. "We've done the movie a hundred percent live," says sound mixer Tod Maitland. "No earpiece, no timing mechanism or anything."

As writer-director James Mangold puts it, "It’s a movie about music that is unadorned and authentic."

"Bob is the center of the movie, and all the other characters intersect, crisscross, and cross-pollinate,” Mangold previously told EW. “But what unites them all is their relationship to Bob. A journey in a movie is sometimes not simply about do you fall in love and stay together forever, but much more — how have you affected each other for the rest of your lives? All of these characters have an absolutely tremendous effect on each other at this moment. Each of them are talents blossoming in this turbulent moment in the country and rising together to stardom.” 

Watch the video above for more.