How Timothée Chalamet learned to sound like Bob Dylan

It happens early in “A Complete Unknown," starring Chalamet as Dylan during his 1960s ascent. The young singer, fresh from Minnesota and visiting his idol Woody Guthrie in a dim New Jersey hospital room, pulls out a guitar and starts to strum and sing, “I’m out here a thousand miles from my home…"

The rendition of “Song to Woody" is a moment of truth for the character, the actor and the audience, says director James Mangold. If it doesn’t deliver, “the entire enterprise of the movie you have sat down to watch will collapse like a house of cards."

Among the many music greats who’ve gotten the biopic treatment, Bob Dylan presents an especially tough multiple choice problem. He’s an artistic deity whose output made a real mark on history. He’s also a living cartoon character with a rasp and patter that has inspired countless bad impressions. And he’s a shapeshifter with many musical phases and a habit of tweaking his own mythology.

To zero in on the essence of Dylan—his music—Chalamet had help from a singing coach to the stars. Eric Vetro is best known for training pop divas to achieve vocal pyrotechnics. With Chalamet, the job was to capture the stripped-down sincerity in one of the most unique voices in American music.

Of his 28-year-old student, Vetro says, “He was really excited to be the one to be able to introduce this music and these lyrics to a new generation." Chalamet, who has said he knew little about Dylan before landing the part, got good enough with the material to do some 35 songs live on camera, including guitar and harmonica work, and for those on-set performances to make the final cut, the filmmakers say.

Vetro’s typical clients are pop stars, including Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter, who have worked with him since they were tweens. Over the years, however, Vetro developed a sub-specialty in helping actors inhabit famous singers. He readied Renée Zellweger to play Judy Garland and Austin Butler to play Elvis Presley. He taught Angelina Jolie how to sing like opera legend Maria Callas for the new biopic “Maria" and schooled Jeremy Allen White in Bruce Springsteen for a picture now in the works, “Deliver Me From Nowhere." For “A Complete Unknown," Vetro also worked with actress Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez as Dylan’s musical and romantic foil.

He first got to know Chalamet while preparing the actor for “Wonka." But when it came time for them to work on Dylan, Chalamet had a head start. He’d been practicing the music since 2018, when he was cast in the role, and had extra time to get better thanks to pandemic and Hollywood strike delays. Along the way, he became the movie-star equivalent of that dude in your college dorm who was always noodling on a guitar. His “Dune" co-star Oscar Isaac has said that Chalamet demonstrated his stuff by playing “Girl From the North Country" for cast-mates.

“Out of all the actors I’ve worked with ever, Timmy came in the most prepared because he had already lived with [Dylan’s music] for a long time," Vetro says.

For several months they did sessions in Vetro’s Los Angeles home, working in a sun-splashed room where there’s a grand piano and white walls filled with platinum records and other mementos from clients. A guitar from Shawn Mendes. Plaques from Katy Perry.

Vetro started by helping Chalamet get more familiar with his own natural singing voice. The actor showed him videos from his days at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, a performing arts school in New York, where he appeared in musical roles such as the emcee in “Cabaret."  Vetro had Chalamet approach vocal routines in the way a 20-something Dylan might, including exercises (“may-may-may, nay-nay-nay") that brought out notes in his nasal cavity.

“When someone does an impersonation of Dylan, what they’re often missing is the sincerity with which he sings those lyrics," Vetro says. “He was getting a message across, and that’s what people gravitated to, not because they were like, ‘Oh, I love that nasal voice.’"

Chalamet studied Dylan’s vintage performance footage as well as his body language and his attitude in press conferences. “We’d be watching an interview and Timmy would start speaking the lines just like Bob did. So then he would go into singing it like Bob, but the Bob of that specific time period," Vetro says.

After Chalamet rehearsed songs with Vetro and others, including guitar coach Larry Saltzman, he recorded them in a studio. The initial plan was to incorporate those pre-recorded tracks into his scenes, a typical method used in biopic films for efficiency and quality assurance. But Chalamet was steeped enough in Dylan’s songs by then for the filmmakers’ to change course. Instead of the actor pretending to play along to the studio tracks, Chalamet sang and played live as the cameras rolled.

Though reviews for the film overall have been mixed, many critics seem to agree that Chalamet pulled off his part in it. A BBC review called him  “completely believable, better than the film itself."

Unlike Mangold’s expansive Johnny Cash biopic, the 2005 film “Walk the Line,"  the story in “A Complete Unknown" focuses on four precipitous years. The story starts with a 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival in New York City and ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he rocked out with a band and blew up his image as a lone prophet with an acoustic guitar.

Some scenes show Dylan in writing mode as tunes such as “Blowin’ in the Wind" tumble out. The trick in delivering “Song to Woody," Mangold says, was that Chalamet had to start hesitantly then gain momentum. The tune had to be raw because Dylan was still developing his sound, but also good enough to produce a look of wonder on the faces of his listeners, Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). At the end, Chalamet holds a note in the word “come" for about 10 seconds—twice as long as Dylan himself did on the song’s original recording. It was an unrehearsed move, Mangold says, that the actor could try because he was performing the song live.

Dylan, who is now 83, never got involved in Chalamet’s performance, Mangold says, but the singer reviewed the screenplay. He circled instances of people calling him “Bob" in the script, and changed that to “Bobby" for most characters. Dylan also crossed out a section of lyrics to “Masters of War" that he would skip when singing it live, the director recalls. “He was like, ‘Oh man, I never did this verse.’"

When they met (in a Santa Monica coffee shop that was closed to the public during the pandemic), Dylan said the decision to go electric at Newport had been less about shaking up the music scene than his craving for the camaraderie of playing in a rock band. “Bob literally used that word for it: He felt lonely onstage by himself, singing with a guitar," Mangold recalls. That insight helped shape the film’s climactic scenes of Chalamet-as-Dylan performing rock numbers like “Maggie’s Farm" and “Like a Rolling Stone." Says Mangold, “You really see the way Timmy’s performances lifts and his mood buoys."

Dylan hasn’t seen the film, according to the director, but in a recent post on his X account, the singer endorsed “A Complete Unknown" (“what a title!") and its star, writing, “I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me."

Write to John Jurgensen at John.Jurgensen@wsj.com