Bob Dylan drama A Complete Unknown is a story about the collision between a musical genius and a world in thrall to him. Writer/director James Mangold discusses four key scenes.
“I am a Dylan fan, not a fanatic,” says James Mangold, director, writer and producer of Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet stars as the enigmatic singer/songwriter and folk revolutionary, with Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo — a fictionalised version of Dylan’s then girlfriend Suze Rotolo — Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash.
“Making a movie because you are a [fanatic] is a terrible reason — it will distort the entire way you view it,” says Mangold. “Any chance the thing has for balance and moderation is gone if you have nothing but adoration for your subject. You must have adoration for all the characters.” Co-written with Jay Cocks, A Complete Unknown is Mangold’s second music biopic after 2005’s Walk The Line, which told the story of Johnny Cash and June Carter, and won a best actress Oscar for Reese Witherspoon.
A Complete Unknown is set between 1961, when the 19-year-old Dylan rocked up in New York’s Greenwich Village to take the folk world by storm, becoming not only a bestselling musician but the voice of his generation, and 1965, when he went electric at Newport Folk Festival and alienated a significant section of his fanbase.
The film has drawn plaudits for its craft and performances, with the main cast (aside from Fanning) singing and playing their own instruments.
It has garnered six Bafta and eight Oscar nominations, the latter including three (best picture, director and adapted screenplay) for Mangold himself. Global box office stands at $75m at press time.
Dylan catches a spark
The scene: Bob Dylan visits his hero Woody Guthrie in hospital and sings a song he wrote for him, as Pete Seeger watches on in admiration.
JAMES MANGOLD: “We all felt there was a tremendous importance to this scene, because it serves so many purposes. We shot it in the first week and it’s the first moment Timothée is Bob Dylan singing and playing. There’s a judgment the audience is going to make that’s no different than for a film about Hobbits or Star Wars. People are going to decide, ‘Do I buy this?’ In a sense, our special effect is Timothée, and his portrayal of Bob.
“But there are added complexities. You want him to be impressive but he won’t be believable if he’s too good, because he’s just arrived in town, he’s in a stressful circumstance, playing on the drop of a dime for a hero of his. So Timothée and I must find a path by which you have a shaky Bob, who’s impressive enough for the audience to buy, and good enough that it justifies the reactions of the two other characters in the scene. Whatever this young man is doing has to be somehow momentous to them for the story to continue.
“On a performance level, Timmy started shaky, then grew in confidence, so you felt his nerves and awkwardness, and saw Bob gathering strength and steam through the power of his own song.
“When Timothée was doing research in Minnesota, he found a record sleeve of a Woody Guthrie 78 [rpm] at a collector’s — a guy who owns Bob Dylan’s childhood house. It was a plain brown sleeve on which a 17- or 18-year-old Dylan had drawn a picture of himself in the lower left, holding a guitar case, with a road going up, right across the hole for the label, and a picture of New York City. It said, ‘Woody in New York.’ And he put a sign on the road that said ‘Bound For Glory’, the title of Guthrie’s book. Then, in the lower right-hand corner, he wrote the first two verses of ‘Song For Woody’ in pencil. That was before he ever left for New York.
“The intentionality in Dylan to go find his hero and sing him this song was a powerful thing for Timothée and me. The line Jay Cocks and I wrote, ‘Catch a spark,’ was a confession of the level of intention that brought Bob to this hospital room at this time.”
Freewheelin’ photoshoot
The scene: Dylan and Sylvie sit on the front steps of their apartment building, while a photographer snaps them for ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ album cover.
MANGOLD: “I feel Elle is playing a kind of ambassador for the audience in the movie. She is smart, involved, aware, has taste, is connected and fascinated by Bob, but cannot make that music, has no financial interest in the music, and is merely a confidante and friend. Her relationship with Bob was personal. I sensed she was someone — she’s passed on — he still maintained, in his heart, a pure, positive feeling about.
“The interest Bob had in making sure we used a different name for Suze was very much based on the idea she was the only one who hadn’t made the celebrity deal with the devil and was not famous.
“She was a tremendous influence on him. He wasn’t, by nature, a political singer. That came from his association with her — her passion and the articulate way she talked. Also, it’s the one real relationship he has in the movie where there isn’t an agenda beyond intimacy. Pete needs a star, Joan needs songs, Albert Grossman wants a client, the record company wants successful albums, the fans want more of what you did last year. Everyone has a very clear agenda. But Sylvie/Suze does not.
“Bob opened conversations with me saying, ‘I’m not telling you to do what I’m saying, I’m just telling you what I think.’ And he was really cool about it, given he was giving me his entire library and life rights, and the co-operation of his entire operation. I think he saw I didn’t have an agenda. That I had a fair mind about all those involved. He understands his character can’t be perfect. He can’t deny the provocative things he’s said in print and on film. He’s not living in denial about his character and personality.
“What he contributed was what he remembered of those moments. Who called him ‘Bob’ and who called him ‘Bobby’. That Grossman was often packing a pistol because he was frightened about some mobsters from Chicago he had left behind when he’d run a jazz club there. Bob contributed all this granular detail.
“In that sense, it was very collegial. I think it’s hard for people to believe because we’ve built up such a perception of him as this puppet master — enigmatic, mysterious, provocative, difficult. What I found was an open-hearted movie fan who had read the script thoughtfully and would share his feelings about the other characters, his admiration for them and his puzzlement over how exactly it got so toxic between them all.”
The Times Are A-Changin’
The scene: Joan Baez plays the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, as Dylan waits backstage, about to sing the anthemic ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
MANGOLD: “From the moment I saw Monica [Barbaro] read, unlike many other women who were auditioning for the part, she had a kind of maturity, groundedness and almost bravado about her — a kind of matter-of-factness, no-bullshitness, that is part of who she is. That seemed to be in line with what I felt Joan had, but it would also make Timmy [Chalamet] a little off-balance, in a great way, that there was tremendous power in her. I wanted her to feel like this kind of veteran. Whereas Bob, for all his brilliance and provocativeness, is still a newbie.
“My experience making Walk The Line was that you can will things into happening. You have to believe your actors are going to sing — you can always deal with it later if it truly becomes impossible. Folk music’s main characteristic is not its perfectionism, but its authenticity, emotional and otherwise — its intensity, realness and liveness. The feeling that it’s one human being telling this story.
“The idea of doing that through the technology of [actors singing to] playback seemed to be a bronze or silver prize, when the gold would be feeling these songs coming out of these characters [for real].
“What Timmy did [in this] was just short of miraculous. We shook hands on making this movie together in the middle of 2019 and I’ve watched him grow as an artist and a man. We’ve become friends, so I’m not unbiased. I adore him. But there’s another level, which is the focus with which he applied himself, making three or four other movies in the time between when we launched and made this movie, carrying a guitar around the world and working on this character in the background.
“He is a young man who, not unlike Bob, is savagely talented but also hardworking. His performance was about finding that balance between him and Bob — a tip of the hat to the behaviours and vocal cadence of Dylan, but also bringing himself, his own personality, to the role. Otherwise, you just have a two‑hour impression, a mimicry act.
“The goal that Timmy and I always had was to find the drama inside the music. The drama doesn’t stop when people sing. I don’t think of the movie as musical sequences, I think of it as a two-hour-and-15-minute drama in which some of the dialogue and monologues are sung to guitar, and some are spoken.
“I didn’t want to watch someone sing without knowing how it was affecting others — how the backstage, romantic and political intrigue, the feelings of hurt or mistrust, are all fuelling or colouring that specific performance on that day. And Timmy mastered it.”
Going electric
The scene: At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan causes a near riot by playing an electric guitar, to the anger of the folk establishment, with Seeger threatening to cut the power to the stage, and someone in the crowd yelling “Judas”.
MANGOLD “When I came on the movie it was called Going Electric. I felt it was not a movie about going electric; I thought it was a movie about genius and it’s unknowability. Also, the slightly fragile family that forms around genius that is almost doomed to explode, because the one thing that usually surrounds genius and immense talent is many agendas, many of which are financial, egotistical or political. So the idea that at the centre was this unknowable person — or a person who had come from nothing and soon became, in a sense, the king — was interesting to me.
“For Newport ’65, we open with a quite raucously excited crowd, that can’t wait for Bob to come on stage. They love him. And then what he confronts them with, at least for half the audience, is stupefying, threatening or worse. Of course, I have all the reactions of our other principal cast to this act of defiance that Bob is unveiling, but there are many kinds of truth. And the more principals you interview, the more versions of the story you hear.
“I don’t know that no-one screamed ‘Judas’ at Newport — but we did steal his response from the Manchester concert [that happened] six months later. I wanted the audience to understand all the different ways people expressed and experienced his quote/unquote betrayal.
“I wanted that scene to have [the feeling of a] holiday dinner run amok, where people are storming about, throwing dishes and driving off, never to come back home again. That’s what I was after, and what I felt really happened — a fight that had been brewing in this family for five years, and this was the day it was going to happen.
“Every testimony we got from the people who were there said it was the angriest they ever saw Pete Seeger. Some said he was angry about the sound, others that he was revolted by the music itself.
“I can’t do that with a movie. I have to drop the hammer on one nail. So I try to do the one that strikes me as the most emotionally truthful through the haze of everyone’s recollections, the one that seems like it will be the most fun and evocative of the themes of the movie.
“What I can offer the audience is the vibe, a sense of what it felt like to be there — the mayhem, the controversy, the drama, the conflict, the hurt, the anguish, even the humour, in that moment.”
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