See Timothée Chalamet filming Bob Dylan movie in Hoboken as Chalamaniacs buzz around set

Lilly Sloves was studying for an exam Friday night when she learned Timothée Chalamet would be filming his new movie just blocks away.

Sloves, a student at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, is a dedicated Chalamaniac — the reigning term for the actor’s devotees.

She was more than willing to take a break to see if she could spy the actor on set.

Chalamet, the 28-year-old megastar of the “Dune” films, “Wonka” and more, plays a young Bob Dylan in the James Mangold film “A Complete Unknown,” which is filming in New Jersey through June.

Sloves gathered with other Chalamet fans and onlookers across from Moran’s pub on Garden Street in Hoboken late Friday. The bar has been completely made over for the movie to look like McAnn’s, a 1960s New York bar and restaurant.

Nearby streets around the bar and Church Square Park were lined with decade-appropriate vintage cars as a spotlight and a cherry picker loomed high over the street.

Chalamaniacs of all ages turned up to see if they could catch a glimpse of the actor.

“There was a little kid who had a ‘Dune’ Lego set that he wanted Timothée to sign,” Sloves, 18, told NJ Advance Media standing across from the production scene after midnight. “He was out here from 6:30.”

Sloves started her Chalamet watch at 7 p.m., but she never saw him, so she went back to her dorm and returned later.

Around 10 p.m., she lucked out.

Chalamet, clad in all black save for a white shirt, wearing dark sunglasses, boots and a Dylanesque coiffure, strode across the street to the bar for the cameras, smoking a cigarette as a ’60s car drove past the scene (see video below).

“It was so freakin’ cool,” Sloves said. “Me and my friends wanted to scream but they were literally in the middle of filming.”

She shared the Chalamet love by sending a video of the sighting to more friends. The caption: “TIMMY I LOVE U MORE THAN YOU WILL EVER KNOW.”

After that, Sloves could peep the famous face and angular jaw of the “Dune: Part Two” star inside the bar next to another actor who was his double (which caused people to do some double takes).

At about 11:30 p.m., Chalamet was spirited away in a car.

“I totally freaked out,” Sloves said of all the local commotion around the film. “I was begging my friends to come and check it out like every single day that they’ve been here.”

“A Complete Unknown,” written Mangold and Jay Cocks (”Gangs of New York”) and produced by Mangold and Chalamet, covers a young Bob Dylan’s rise to fame in the ’60s, when a teen Dylan left his home state of Minnesota for New York City.

Moran’s, the Irish pub that served as the hub of Hoboken production Friday, was remodeled inside and out for the film, its new blue neon McAnn’s sign underlined by red lamps.

See Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning filming Bob Dylan movie in N.J.

Plastic sheets were draped over film equipment to guard it from intermittent light rain. Trailers and trucks were parked up and down the street, along with craft service tents for the all-night shoot in Hoboken.

The scene may have been set, but so was the start of the weekend. A seemingly intoxicated young man walking down Garden Street with the help of a companion waved his arm and yelled at the film crew as if to dismiss them for the evening.

Sloves, a biomedical engineering major, always had an interest in movies.

“I really wanted to go into film,” she said, but ultimately decided to go a different way.

“Kind of get the best of both worlds with this,” she said as members so the crew milled around on a break from filming.

Her all-time favorite Chalamet movie: the 2018 film “Beautiful Boy,” with Steve Carell.

“I think he’s incredible in it,” Sloves said. “The emotion he shows in it is insane.”

The Dylan movie’s release date has not yet been announced, but the nexus of Chalamet and Bob Dylan fandom has already started to work its magic. Sloves took interest in a Dylan T-shirt after learning the actor had been cast in the movie.

As filming carried on, more onlookers arrived to inquire about Chalamet sightings.

“I’ve literally been in my apartment all day, had no idea this was going on,” said Jessica Nieradka, a 20-year resident of Hoboken.

She has a New York-based job in insurance, but works remotely from her home, where she had been on work calls for hours. After she returned from dinner with a friend, someone screamed “Timothée!” and startled her cat, so she decided to go outside and take a look.

“I’m 47 and I am, like, all about him,” she said of Chalamet. “I think he is de-licious.”

She loved the actor in Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name” (2017) and Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” (2017).

More: Bob Dylan movie ‘A Complete Unknown,’ starring Timothée Chalamet, casting N.J. locals

“I’ve always said to my girlfriends ‘there is something very charismatic and dynamic about this young man’” she said — maybe even a matinee idol quality from a bygone era.

She’s also looking forward to seeing Chalamet as Bob Dylan because she loved the musical biopic “Walk the Line,” Mangold’s 2005 Johnny Cash movie starring Joaquin Phoenix, for which Reese Witherspoon won the Oscar for best actress for playing June Carter.

“James Mangold is incredibly well respected,” she said of the director, who also helmed the Oscar-winning 2019 film “Ford v Ferrari” and the Jersey-set film “Cop Land” (1997).

As a longtime customer of Moran’s pub, she is excited to see her local watering hole on the big screen.

“I was just saying to a friend I hope they don’t cut it,” Nieradka said of the Hoboken-set scenes.

“A Complete Unknown” co-stars Oscar nominee Edward Norton as folk legend Pete Seeger, who died in 2014; Monica Barbaro (”Top Gun: Maverick”) as fellow folk star Joan Baez, who had a relationship with Dylan; and Elle Fanning (”The Great”), who reportedly plays a character inspired by Suze Rotolo, an artist Dylan dated in the early ’60s. (Rotolo, who famously appeared with Dylan on the cover of his second album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” in 1963, died in 2011).

The Searchlight Pictures movie started filming in Jersey in March.

“A Complete Unknown” has filmed in Jersey City, Passaic and Paterson. Chalamet and Fanning were seen earlier this week smiling and laughing on set in both Paterson and Passaic.

In May, “A Complete Unknown” is filming in Cape May.

An open casting call went out for local Jersey extras for the film under the fake name “The Wurtzle Brothers.”

Described as a “1965 music festival,” the Cape May scenes look to be recreating the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan first played an electric guitar live and first performed his hit song “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The movie’s title is a reference to the 1965 song.

“How does it feel?” Dylan sings. “To be on your own, with no direction home. A complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup.