Timothée Chalamet Sings Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” In New A Complete Unknown Promo Clip

Even if you don’t know the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video, you know the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video. The word “video” here is a little misleading, since the promo clip dates back to a time before music videos existed. The song, released in 1965, was Bob Dylan’s first top-40 hit, and it’s known for the opening scene from D.A. Pennebaker’s Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back — a bored-looking Dylan flipping through hand-drawn cue cards of the song’s lyrics while it plays over the soundtrack. That clip has been referenced and parodied a million times, and now we’ve got Timothée Chalamet doing it.

We are now a couple of months away from the release of A Complete Unknown, the new biopic where Chalamet plays the young Bob Dylan. We know that Chalamet does his own singing in the film, and now we get to hear Chalamet verbosely wheezing his way through “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and watch him doing the cue-card bit. We’ve already posted a couple of trailers for the movie, and this is merely the latest piece of promo.

Chalamet looks just fine flipping though those cue cards, though I can’t imagine why it’s shot on washed-out fake-vintage film stock, rather than the crisp black-and-white of Dylan’s original clip. As for the singing, well, Chalamet is very clearly doing a Bob Dylan impression. There are only so many way to sing “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” especially if you’re playing Bob Dylan in a biopic. In the clip, we get shots of the fake video mixed in with images from the movie. Below, watch the recreated version and the Dylan original.