“I saw him,” said Charlotte Barbié, 18, who stood outside the SVA Theater on Friday night, shaking from either the cold or the excitement. “He was blond.”
She indicated that her white Adidas sneaker had just been signed in black marker by the actor Timothée Chalamet.
Ms. Barbié stood among a gaggle of young fans who shrieked when Mr. Chalamet arrived at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic in which he stars that has been nominated for three Golden Globes.
The premiere took place just down West 23rd Street from the fabled Manhattan hotel where Mr. Dylan lived 60 years earlier. The film, directed by James Mangold, traces Mr. Dylan’s arrival in New York as a teenager and his ascent through the Greenwich Village music scene.
Mr. Chalamet sang live in the movie and said he had spent five years working with a harmonica coach to nail the singer’s mannerisms. Although his dark hair is tousled to Dylanesque proportions in the film, on Friday, during red carpet photos, it appeared blond and straight, sticking out from under a turquoise beanie.
He was channeling Mr. Dylan’s look from a Sundance Film Festival appearance in 2003 for the premiere of the film “Masked and Anonymous,” which the musician starred in and wrote with Larry Charles. The look startled Mr. Chalamet’s co-star Monica Barbaro, who plays the folk singer Joan Baez.
“I saw it moments ago,” Ms. Barbaro said, eyeing Mr. Chalamet over her shoulder with a hint of bafflement. “I’m very curious about it.”
“A Complete Unknown,” which will be released in theaters on Dec. 25, is based on the 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!” by Elijah Wald. It recounts the years leading up to Mr. Dylan’s polarizing performance with electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Elle Fanning, a real-life Dylan superfan who plays Sylvie Rosso, a fictionalized version of Mr. Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo, arrived in a butter-yellow gown, happy to discuss the period’s parallels to the present.
“Politically, there was a lot of unrest at that time, like today,” Ms. Fanning said. “But I think what is inspiring to me about the film is that in that space and time, Dylan taking the risk and doing something so small as picking up an electric guitar revolutionized music forever.”
Her favorite lyric of Mr. Dylan’s, she said, was from “The Times They Are a-Changin’”: “And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”
Farther down the carpet, the actor Edward Norton looked slightly naked without the five-string banjo he carries throughout the film as the musician and activist Pete Seeger. He wondered whether he should be rhapsodizing on the significance of a movie about a man so committed to letting his work speak for itself.
“He was so resistant to talking about the meaning of the things he did, and I kind of feel there’s a wisdom in that,” he said of Mr. Dylan.
The actress Edie Falco sped by wearing denim on denim, and the actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris chatted in maroon cowboy boots. Nearby was James Austin Johnson, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member best known for his impression of President-elect Donald J. Trump. (He also does a convincing Dylan impression.)
Kylie Jenner, who had joined Mr. Chalamet at a party after the film’s premiere in Los Angeles, was not present — nor were reporters supposed to ask about rumors that the two were dating. An email from the film’s small army of publicists before the event reminded journalists in bright red text that personal questions were strictly off-limits. But fans who were lined up on the sidewalk gossiped about Mr. Chalamet and Ms. Jenner.
Just before 8 p.m., the cast members and their guests grabbed boxes of popcorn with Mr. Chalamet’s face on them and filed into the theater.
They emerged two hours later, popcorn boxes emptied, and walked one block east to the Chelsea Hotel. The hotel was a bohemian hotbed once home to Mr. Dylan, the playwright Arthur Miller, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the singer Patti Smith, who described it as “eccentric and damned.”
On Friday, the hotel was decorated with Christmas lights and harmonicas, its red leather booths crowded with the next generation of artists and writers.
Mr. Chalamet, who had slipped out of his Bob Dylan look-alike costume, abandoning the beanie and blond bangs, sipped a glass of red wine. For the after-party, his tousled brown hair was pushed back from his face under a pair of dark sunglasses. He posed for a selfie with his castmate Norbert Leo Butz, who plays the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax.
Ms. Fanning had changed into a sparkling black minidress and was chatting in a corner with the actress and director Rebecca Hall. The actress Myha’la Herrold descended the stairs to a subterranean bar, the comedian Keegan-Michael Key nibbled on a bag of French fries and the GQ editor Will Welch made the rounds wearing a smart gray overcoat.
Waiters carried trays of tuna tartare and chickpea fritters past speakers that blared Dolly Parton and Missy Elliott. The denim brand Levi’s, which worked with the film’s costume designer Arianne Phillips on its many pairs of jeans, distributed black T-shirts screen-printed with phrases from Mr. Dylan’s cue cards.
Every third conversation at the party seemed to be about Mr. Chalamet’s performance, which has been praised by some critics and called “cartoonish” by others. Either way, it has already earned Mr. Chalamet a Golden Globe nomination.
Mr. Mangold, the film’s director, said he had been especially apprehensive about one early scene in which Mr. Dylan approaches Woody Guthrie in a hospital room and sings a song from his notebook. But in the first week of filming, Mr. Chalamet delivered.
“Timmy was going to have to convince the audience that he was Bob Dylan in that scene,” Mr. Mangold said. “I remember the first close-up of him doing that song that I shot, I knew we had a movie.”
“A Complete Unknown” joins a crowded field of projects based on Mr. Dylan’s life, including “No Direction Home,” a 2005 documentary by Martin Scorsese, and “I’m Not There,” a 2007 film by Todd Haynes in which six actors played the musician.
Mr. Dylan kept quiet about this latest rendition until last week, when he posted an endorsement of Mr. Chalamet on X that seemed to hint at the strangeness of seeing so many versions of oneself onscreen.
“Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me,” Mr. Dylan wrote. “Or a younger me. Or some other me.”
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