Timothée Chalamet Sings As Bob Dylan In The A Complete Unknown Trailer

It's been 17 years since Jake Kasdan delivered the definitive, beat-by-beat parody of the popular music biopic with "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," but filmmakers keep churning out these cookie-cutter, rise-and-fall portraits of great artists. Even when done reasonably well (e.g. "Elvis," "Rocketman," and "Straight Outta Compton"), they're little more than jukebox musicals that play the greatest hits and misses of their subjects' lives. Worst of all, given that you need to license the songs from the artists or their estates, these subjects have creative control over their story –- i.e. they'll only get as ugly as the artist or their estate can bear.

This brings us to James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown." Mangold, who made one of the better music biopics of the 21st century in "Walk the Line," has wisely limited the scope of his Bob Dylan film to the artist's early-to-mid-1960s transformation from conscience-pricking folk singer to electric-guitar-wielding rock prophet. This saves him from having to contend with Dylan's subsequent shapeshifting over the next several decades (masterfully depicted in Todd Haynes' invigoratingly unconventional "I'm Not There"), but he's still got a daunting challenge before him. Dylan's genius is undisputed, but the way he treated his friends and lovers is, depending on who's doing the telling, a tale of betrayal or worse.

It's impossible to determine from this just-released teaser exactly how unvarnished and unconventional Mangold will be able to get with Dylan on board as a producer, but one thing's for sure: Timothée Chalamet's portrayal of the artist as a mercurial young man will be the talk of the movie world whenever this film hits theaters (it only wrapped principal photography not too long ago). So, what can we determine this far out?

Just as Joaquin Phoenix laid down his own vocals as Johnny Cash in "Walk the Line," so, too, is Chalamet putting his voice to the test with "A Complete Unknown." The trailer offers but a small taste of the actor evoking Dylan's nasally, folkie pitch from his early album work, and so far he's seems to be doing a perfectly satisfactory job. "A Complete Unknown" itself looks pretty visually captivating, with Mangold's longtime DP Phedon Papamichael using the flare of spotlights and street lamps to conjure feelings of a place long since lost to time. The question is, can Chalamet vanish fully into the shoes of the Tambourine Man, or will it feel like two hours of the "Dune" and "Call Me By Your Name" heartthrob playing dress-up?

Searchlight Pictures is certainly high on the picture, penciling it in for an award-qualifying run sometime near the end of the year. Musical biopics are a real crapshoot when it comes to the Oscars, but when they hit, they hit hard, with the likes of "Ray," "Walk the Line," and "Bohemian Rhapsody" having won in the major categories in decades past. With a supporting cast that features venerated names like Ed Norton, Elle Fanning, and Scoot McNairy, along with Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Norbert Leo Butz, and Dan Fogler, this one aims to make some noise. We'll see how it fares when "A Complete Unknown" comes ramblin' into theaters this December.