Music : BBC4 to celebrate Bob Dylan ahead of ‘A Complete Unknown’ release

BBC4 have announced plans to celebrate Bob Dylan‘s music ahead of the UK release of A Complete Unknown.

The Timothée Chalamet-starring biopic, which charts the music great’s transition from acoustic folk idol to electric rock star in the mid-’60s, is set to hit big screens in the UK on January 17.

Now, BBC4 have unveiled plans to run a series of programmes that will dive into the career of Dylan on January 10 – a week ahead of the film’s release.

The celebrations will begin at 10:20pm GMT with a broadcast of Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, a 2005 documentary film by Martin Scorsese that explores the period between Dylan’s arrival in New York in January 1961 and his “retirement” from touring following his motorcycle accident in July 1966.

Afterwards, BBC4 will air Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom, a live concert film shot in California in 2021, while Dylan’s Never Ending Tour was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can check out the full schedule here.

At the time, his Shadow Kingdom live-stream concert was given four stars by NME, with Rhian Daly writing: “Instead of beaming us into the future, Shadow Kingdom takes into the smoky recesses of the past – both in its setting (it begins in a black-and-white club in a wooden hut before moving to other locations) and in the setlist, which draws from mostly deep-cuts from his ‘60s and ‘70s releases.”

In A Complete Unknown news, this month, Chalamet channelled Dylan directly himself at the A Complete Unknown premiere in New York City, complete with facial hair, blonde locks, leather jacket and grey scarf.

The actor also learned to play 30 songs from the Dylan catalogue in his years-long preparation for the film and took lessons from a vocal coach, a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach and a harmonica tutor.

Dylan recently praised Chalamet’s efforts in the film and said “Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”

He continued: “The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”

Chalamet has since responded to the praise while quote-tweeting Dylan’s post. “Floored,” he wrote. “I am so grateful. Thank you Bob.”

In NME’s four-star review of the film, Alex Flood wrote: “The most important (and often trickiest) job of any music movie is to get the music right. And this nails that. If you’re a Bob newbie, you’ll leave the cinema ready to dive into his back catalogue.

“If you’re already a fan, the next few weeks will be spent making playlists of lesser-known B-sides or reading the lore around a scene you weren’t familiar with. And that’s why it was a good idea to make this film – a mad idea, but a good one.”

Meanwhile, ‘A Complete Unknown’ was selected by former President Barack Obama as one of his favourite films of 2024.

Levis also recently announced a new clothing line inspired by Chalamet’s depiction of Dylan, including a jacket and a pair of jeans that are directly inspired by those worn in the film, which were closely modelled on original outfits donned by Dylan in the ‘60s.