The ‘Complete Unknown’ next door: N.J. actors on Bob Dylan movie filmed in Jersey

“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? And where have you been, my darling young one?”

New Jersey, that’s where.

When Timothée Chalamet underwent his transformation into young Bob Dylan, performing songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963) and “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), he did it in Jersey.

“A Complete Unknown,” the movie that tracks Dylan’s rise to prominence in the 1960s, filmed extensively in the Garden State.

Director James Mangold made Jersey his canvas, from Warren County to Cape May County, with Jersey City, Hoboken, Paterson and Newark subbing in for ’60s Manhattan and Mountainside and Cape May playing Newport, Rhode Island.

For two actors in the ensemble cast, that meant working on home turf.

P.J. Byrne, who grew up in Old Tappan, plays music promoter Harold Leventhal, and Charlie Tahan, who hails from Glen Rock, plays Al Kooper, the organist featured prominently on “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Byrne and Tahan spoke with NJ Advance Media ahead of the film’s Dec. 25 release. With the movie well positioned to land Oscar nominations come January, they talked about the Jersey sets, Chalamet’s performance and the film’s potential for minting new Dylan fans.

Telling the story, but keeping the mystery

Since “A Complete Unknown” was so heavily rooted in Hudson County, it was a particularly short commute for Tahan.

“There were several days where I could basically walk to set from my apartment, which was a luxury,” says the actor, who lives in Hoboken.

Tahan, 26, is known for playing Wyatt Langmore in the Emmy-winning series “Ozark.” One of his early films as a child actor was the hit post-apocalyptic movie “I Am Legend” (2007) with Will Smith. Some of his most recent movies include the thrillers “Unsubscribe” (2020), “The Pale Blue Eye” (2022) and “I’ll Be Right There” (2023), a comedy with Edie Falco.

“My family’s beyond excited,” he says of his role as Kooper in “A Complete Unknown,” one of the big films on offer for the holidays — the kind easily watched with parents and grandparents.

“A lot of the stuff I’ve done in the past might be uncomfortable to watch with family or something, but something like this, it’s very nice to be able to go see it with everyone all together,” Tahan says.

The Dylan movie, scripted by Mangold (”Cop Land,” “Walk the Line,” “Ford v Ferrari,” “Girl, Interrupted”) and Jay Cocks (”Gangs of New York”), is based on the 2015 Elijah Wald book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.”

The “complete unknown” in the film’s title (”what a title,” Dylan himself recently said) is lifted from Dylan’s landmark 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone,” which announced his move from folk music to folk rock at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Mangold’s film drives toward the young artist’s performance at the festival, where he officially went “electric,” and in so doing, sent shockwaves through the folk community that had welcomed him and nurtured his talent.

Of course, Bob Dylan largely remains “unknown” to the public because of the enduring mystery associated with his persona — notwithstanding his occasional post on X, formerly Twitter. But before he became a folk artist and rock sensation, he was an unknown Minnesota teen with a guitar who traveled to New York. Dylan was 19 when he got to the city in 1961 and started to connect with the music scene in Greenwich Village. That’s where the movie finds him.

READ MORE: Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan movie ‘A Complete Unknown’ spent $80M in N.J. — here’s every film location

“Reading the script, I knew it was something special,” Tahan says. “I loved how many of Bob’s songs it included, and how many of Bob’s songs that I did not know were included in it.”

“Dylan is such a sort of a mysterious character, still, and this movie, this script definitely didn’t try to demystify him, or take away from the mystery of him and how we see him, but it still is from his point of view. And I thought that was really interesting, but it also felt like a big ensemble movie, and a lot of the script had to do with the effects of Dylan’s career on the people surrounding him and his relationships and bandmates and the city at the time.”

Quiet moments let Dylan’s music and lyrics — and Chalamet’s singing as Dylan — shine. They also make a case for Chalamet to be a contender for best actor at the Oscars.

“I just felt lucky to be there and to be a part of it,” Tahan said hours before going to the film’s New York premiere Dec. 13, calling Chalamet “incredible.”

“With a role like this, it’s sort of all about finding your place and footing within that, and not messing with their tone and what they’re doing already. So it’s kind of like walking into a room where a conversation’s already going on and you have to sort of join it.”

Tahan had the benefit of talking to the real Al Kooper before playing him onscreen.

“I spoke to Al on the phone several times,” he says of the 80-year-old musician, songwriter and producer, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. “He’s an amazing guy. I kind of just reached out to him. I just sort of wanted his blessing and he was beyond supportive. And we talked for a couple hours about his time at Newport with Dylan, meeting Dylan. That was a very special experience that I had doing this movie.”

No direction home? All roads lead to Jersey.

Another member of the “A Complete Unknown” cast, P.J. Byrne, is an actor widely seen across film and TV.

He’s delivered memorable performances through supporting roles in big titles, from Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” to DC’s “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” the Amazon series “The Boys” and “Gen V,” HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and more.

Byrne’s New Jersey credentials are many — born in Maplewood, raised in Old Tappan, the actor is related to Brendan Byrne, governor of New Jersey from 1974 to 1982 (his father’s cousin). P.J.’s mother, Emma Byrne, was director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs (she presided over a revealing investigation of Sears during her tenure). She was also deputy press secretary for Gov. Byrne and former Sen. Bill Bradley’s senior adviser during his run for president.

Byrne the actor, who now lives in Los Angeles, wound up in his chosen profession after rerouting plans for a career in finance. He stayed over in Hoboken during the filming of “A Complete Unknown,” which brings up more local ties. His 11-year-old daughter, Madison, is named for The Madison Bar & Grill on Washington Street — it’s where he met his wife, Jaime Byrne, on New Year’s Eve in 2003. His cousin is a dentist in Hoboken. His aunt’s family runs Fiore’s Deli. He really, really wants to retire at the Jersey Shore.

“I miss New Jersey, I love it, it was magical,” Byrne, 50, said while in New York for the film’s premiere.

He was taking a brief detour from filming in Dublin, Ireland for the upcoming series “The Rainmaker,” a USA Network show based on the 1995 John Grisham novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1997 film adaptation. (He’s playing Deck Shifflet, the role Danny DeVito played in the film — fellow “A Complete Unknown” actor Dan Fogler is among the cast.)

Byrne also filmed the Dylan movie at Echo Lake Park in Mountainside, which became the setting for many of the film’s festival scenes, including those that take place at the Newport Folk Festival. More of the 1965 festival, home to the “going electric” moment, was set in Cape May.

The concert becomes a kind of showdown between folk traditionalists and Dylan, who takes a new path in his career after those like his mentor and friend, folk legend Pete Seeger, pin their hopes on the young standout being their new folk champion.

Recreating the festival was particularly thrilling for Byrne, who says he was “insanely excited” about being cast in the movie because he’s a huge Woody Guthrie fan. His favorite Dylan song is “Song to Woody,” from his self-titled debut album, released in 1962.

In the beginning of the film, young Dylan travels to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains to meet Guthrie, his hero, played by Scoot McNairy. Guthrie, who has Huntington’s disease, acknowledges Dylan but cannot speak. The former Essex County Isolation Hospital in Belleville, also known as Soho Hospital (Arkham State Hospital in “Joker: Folie à Deux”), stood in for Greystone in those scenes.

“He came to meet his idols,” Byrne says of Dylan’s motivation for coming to New York. “He came to meet, to try to find Woody Guthrie.”

In the process, he meets Seeger, who takes him under his wing. Oscar nominee Edward Norton (”a genius,” Byrne says) plays Seeger, while “Top Gun Maverick” actor Monica Barbaro (”spectacular”) plays folk singer Joan Baez, who had a musical and romantic relationship with Dylan. Like Chalamet, both Seeger and Barbaro sing in the movie.

Emmy nominee Elle Fanning (”The Great”) plays Sylvie Russo, a character based on artist Suze Rotolo, who also had a relationship with Dylan in the ’60s. She appears with Dylan on the cover of his 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” (After reading the script, Dylan asked Mangold to change Rotolo’s name in the film.) Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, another of Dylan’s heroes and the subject of Mangold’s 2005 film “Walk the Line.”

Byrne’s character, Harold Leventhal, might be a smaller character in “A Complete Unknown,” but he played a big role in the folk scene.

He was a manager for Seeger and worked with Seeger’s group The Weavers and with Baez. A Carnegie Hall concert he put together reinvigorated folk music in the 1950s after The Weavers were blacklisted. After promoting Dylan’s first New York concert, he finds himself in the middle of a musical conflict in the movie when Dylan makes a move toward rock, worrying folk purists ahead of the Newport festival.

“He really was a mensch,” Byrne says of Leventhal, who died in 2005. “He was a wonderful guy ... He just believed in these people and (that) the music should be heard ... He honored art in every way. He promoted art, he helped people, people would lean on him just for advice and he was always there for everybody.”

Timothée Chalamet’s solar system

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the SAG strike, Chalamet was afforded extra time to get ready for his big turn as Dylan.

“He had five years to prepare for this ... he used the time to really do the work and I think it really shows, because it was so ingrained in him,” Byrne says. “He did the 10,000 hours and he honored Bob Dylan, and he honored the music. We usually get, like, three months tops to do something, but he was so purely able to be in the zone and just almost, like, channel him in his own artistic way. I got to watch every night. I heard him sing 1,000 times, every song. And I was always like ‘Holy God, this is spectacular, spectacular.’ And you’re just getting chills ... I was like ‘oh, this is a moment.’”

He likens the feeling to watching Margot Robbie cry “32 times in a row” on the set of “Babylon” and Leonardo DiCaprio perform monologues on the set of “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

“Whether they get the Oscar or not, these are special moments in time,” he says. “You’ve got to ride this wave with them and you feel this energy in the room just change.”

Byrne calls Chalamet, who turns 29 this week, “wildly intelligent.”

“You just want to hang out with the guy all the time,” he says of the superstar actor, who also leads the “Dune” movies. “He’s really a special human being, and I cannot be happier for him. I cannot wait to see the incredible things he does in his future. I’m just pumped — you root for guys like that.”

Byrne encourages everyone to take in Chalamet’s singing, and especially to “listen to the words.”

There is a certain stillness during those performances that helps to draw the audience in more than any prosthetic nose could (though Chalamet does wear one, albeit not as aquiline as Dylan’s nose).

“The art and the pureness of the characters comes in that stillness, or letting them be who they really are,” Byrne says. “Not these quick cuts ... let’s live in it for a second.”

“The beauty of Jim’s (Mangold’s) movies is — he says it all the time — ‘follow the sun.’ And in this movie, Timmy’s the sun ... I got to give it to Mangold. He taught me a lot. He taught me to be still, and because of that, we help what the real story is. This is a story about a slice of time with Dylan and where he was, and we’re all here to service that.”

Dylan discovery

“A Complete Unknown” started filming in New Jersey in March and was still rolling as recently as June.

Byrne attributes the quick turnaround to Mangold’s vision.

“He’s cutting it as we’re filming it,” he says. “He sees it. He really is six steps ahead of everything.”

The Searchlight Pictures movie spent more than $80 million filming in Jersey, per the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission.

Tahan was immediately impressed by the production design, which transported Hoboken and Jersey City businesses and storefronts to ′60s Greenwich Village and New York.

“They really sprung for all the bells and whistles,” he says. “I could tell that the frames were gonna be rich and full, and I knew it was going to be a visually beautiful movie as soon as I stepped on set.”

The film took full advantage of the various landscapes of Jersey — Kinnelon even played Northern California.

A story about Dylan starring Chalamet is poised to draw multiple generations to theaters, so there will be more people seeing the breadth of the Jersey landscape (10 counties’ worth), even if they don’t know it.

“It has such a wide appeal while still being faithful to diehard Dylan fans or people who were around at the time, or even went to the concerts,” Tahan says. “I think it’ll do them justice and new people.”

As for those new people, Chalamet may just prompt his young fans to become Dylan heads.

“I could probably only name 10 songs before I started this,” Tahan says. “I think that’s one of the most amazing parts ... Without a doubt, a younger audience will discover his discography more through this movie, just like I did through working on it.”

“A Complete Unknown,” rated R, runs 2 hours and 21 minutes and is in theaters starting Wednesday, Dec. 25.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.