James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown takes its title from one of the most famous rock songs of all time and most of its information from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties. Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” has been covered by artists as disparate as Bob Marley and the Wailers, Green Day and the actual Rolling Stones, while Wald’s book uses 368 pages to explain the cultural significance of just 24 hours in Bob Dylan’s storied career.
A whole industry has grown up around Dylan, with followers collecting books about him, bootleg recordings and, in one case, even rooting through his trash can (a stunt that crossed a line for more serious “Dylanologists”). He has been touring regularly, all over the world, for 60 years, and yet he remains a riddle wrapped in an enigma. His lyrics are indelible but slippery; arguments still rage about the subject of “Like a Rolling Stone”; some say it’s about Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s doomed superstar and allegedly an old flame, but while the actress might seem a perfect fit, the timeframe doesn’t quite match.
Some have even said that “Like a Rolling Stone” might even be about Dylan himself, and his uneasy relationship with fame (on “Idiot Wind”, on 1975’s Blood on the Tracks LP, he sings, “You’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom.”) It’s this restlessness and endless need for self-deconstruction that led Todd Haynes to cast six actors—including, most famously, Cate Blanchett—in his 2007 biopic I’m Not There.
For James Mangold—born in 1963, just after the singer became an overnight star on the folk scene, even while pairing up with scene queen Joan Baez, who frequently recorded his songs—Dylan was always out there, somewhere. “I thought he was one of the greats,” he says. “Just a brilliant poet, storyteller, an artist. I had grown up with him as something my dad listened to, at first. And then, I think, in the mid-’80s when I was in college, I got Infidels [1983], which was a great album of his, and that kind of made me, again, lean in. I kind of go on like this; I’ve had periods where I’m listening to him all the time and then let go for a year or so and then dive back in again. He’s really inspiring.”
Although it took five years to bring A Complete Unknown to the screen, with his screenplay co-written with Jay Cocks, Mangold had Timothée Chalamet right from the start, after a heads-up in Telluride 2019 from Searchlight brass that the actor would be interested. They met in a hotel in Toronto, when Ford v Ferrari was premiering at TIFF, and they cemented a commitment to do it.
Still, Mangold can’t quite place when it all started coming together. “It’s all gradual,” he says. “You kind of enter in, and think it’s fascinating, and then you realize what you’ve bitten off and then you just try and write your way out of that fear. And then somewhere in there, Bob Dylan said, ‘Come over and see me,’ and I ended up spending time with him. And that was a huge gift, not just for the information and emotional energy that I got off him, but in another way—a sense that it was OK, that it was going to be OK.”
Looking back, though, the director admits that, even though he was confident that Chalamet could do it, success was not a given. “I knew he had the chops to do it early on in the process,” he recalls, “knowing that he was continuing to work in a very disciplined fashion. But chops isn’t good enough. We don’t know these things. You gamble. An actor is gambling on the director. Do you know the director is going to make a good movie? Do you know if they’re going to show up for work every day? And to I know if the same is going to be true for me? If we’re being honest, no. But what I did know is that he had all the ingredients and thirst to do something great. We had a great relationship.”
“A huge part of the director-actor thing is to find a groove with each other,” he continues. “And Timmy’s a pleasure, I think in part because he’s worked with so many other really wonderful directors, some of whom I’m friendly with and who have engendered trust. He’s not an abused child. He believes in the director, loves working with the director, and he comes from that tradition and hasn’t learned any lessons to the opposite. To me, that makes it a divine collaboration, because you’re really walking hand in hand and not pushing back against each other all the time.”
Was Chalamet’s own enthusiasm based on a particular interest in Dylan’s music? “Not particularly, no,” the actor says. “A friend of my father, who was a Dylanologist, had a really striking black and white portrait of Bob in his house when I was growing up, and when I visited there, I was always drawn to the mystic expression on Bob’s face. But, truthfully, I didn’t know much about him beyond the songs in American culture. Like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, songs that are so much part of the fabric of the country or the DNA that they are imbued in you growing up.”
Equally surprising is that Chalamet claims now that wasn’t particularly daunted by the task of performing Dylan’s songs live. Not because he especially confident, but because the original intention was to mime to his own re-recordings of those songs.
“It was such an involved process,” he says. “It was five years in the making. So, the prerecords I did in LA and Burbank with Nick Baxter, our music supervisor, I really thought we were going to use those. Then when, it came time to do it, it just was better live, and it felt more lived in and more authentic. And caused a bit of a panic on set, but it was worth it. But that’s almost my job as an interpreter, as an actor, is to do it like that. What would be the point of making preconceived decisions the night before? To [record] a track and then make sure that I was matching me—matching me, matching Bob.”
Chalamet also handles, quite brilliantly, the chameleon-like qualities that Dylan used as a coping strategy to deal with fame, notably turning his back on the protest songs that helped him make his name. “I could never speak for Bob—he’s alive and, well, he probably has a different opinion on it than I do,” he says. “But my guess is, in that period, he was as inspired by the form of protest writing—and, in another sense, topical songwriting—as he was inspired by what the actual message was, which is a little more mysterious. We don’t really know where he ever landed on these causes, and I think he purposefully obscured that. Because, soon after, he went on and made Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. And couple years after that, he was recording ‘Watching the River Flow’ where the opening line is, “What’s the matter with me? I don’t have much to say.” That’s my sense of it, but that’s just my interpretation.”
To this end, Chalamet was on board with Mangold’s determination that this not be a straightforward biopic where everything is explained. “This was always going to be a fable,” he says. “This was not meant to be a Wikipedia fact-for-fact recreation of how it was. There’s all the audiovisual material that exists of him that I could study. And in the total of the universe, there’s what’s on the page, and I could go forward with that.” Instead, he focused on the mystery. “I don’t know if I should say much more than that,” he says, somewhat mysteriously. “I don’t want to say much more than that…”
Mangold says believes that this organic approach to the shoot is the secret of his film’s success. “Honestly, you get to a certain point where, if you worry too much about what people are going to think, the same people will criticize you for thinking too much about the marketplace or what people think,” he says. “So, you’re kind of left to follow your instincts and your passions and visualize those. If you don’t pick a high mountain, you don’t get to climb high. One thing goes with the other. You have to be brave somehow. I was mostly worried for Timmy. The world has gotten much more harsh than it used to be. But in order to function, you have to put that out of your mind and just try and believe. Still, there’s an idealist in me that believes if you try hard, people will recognize that. There is no such thing as perfection 100% of the time, but people can tell when you’re working your ass off. And most people who are fair are going to recognize that when they see the movie.”
The climax of the movie is what Elijah Wald’s book is all about: Bob Dylan’s decision to play an electric set at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, a move that horrified the folk purists who’d welcomed him just a few years before. One of these was Dylan’s close friend Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of folk and roots music who’s played in the film by Edward Norton as a kindly patriarch who is confounded by Dylan’s betrayal.
“I was aware of Pete Seeger just because my parents went to college from 1960 to 1964,” Norton says. “Literally, right in this zone. And so, when I was a very small child growing up, my mom had every Joan Baez record, and every Judy Collins record, and Peter, Paul and Mary record, all of it. And a lot of those people covered Pete Seeger’s songs. So, you would hear ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ or ‘If I Had a Hammer’. And then, when I was little and interested, I would look on the record, and it’d say, ‘Pete Seeger.’ So, I actually knew from a very young age, “Oh, Pete Seeger is one of the people who wrote these songs,” and I was aware of him. When I moved to New York in my 20s, even then Pete Seeger held this [esteem]… In New York circles, he was the great artist activist. You knew him as the folk singer who cleaned up the Hudson River. So, he has stood large in the consciousness, I think, of artists, certainly on the East Coast.”
“But then I realized that I only knew a measure of his music,” he continues, “and when I started really taking a dive into his music, I realized what a deep library it was. And then, I also realized I knew very little about his life before that period of the ’60s that I knew the music so well. I knew nothing about him being blacklisted under the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the ’50s, and the psychological impact that it had. How emotionally significant Dylan, and Joan Baez, and the rise of that generation was to him; they were like the seeds he had planted coming to fruition in that period. The new things I learned informed me a lot, I think, about why the relationship with Dylan was loaded, in some sense, in a positive way. It meant a lot to him that Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, and these others picked up the torch that he had carried through all these difficult years. That was all a revelation to me. It was really interesting to learn.”
Just as Chalamet approached the idea of Dylan as opposed to the reality, Norton soon became accustomed to the idea that this was not a straight docudrama. “The way Jim approached this film, it was very compelling to me because I had a little bit of hesitation,” he says. “This music and these people were so iconic, and almost mythological to me. Sometimes you feel it’s a little dangerous. ‘Why are we doing this?’ And Jim was so articulate, I think, about the idea of this thing that happened in Newport that’s become this cultural legend, almost. ‘Dylan goes electric.’ It’s an event. It’s a headline. And he talked about wanting to reverse-engineer out of that to understand what was behind that moment: What would possibly make people flip out about one of the greatest music artists ever just doing something different? It made Jim want to examine the period leading up to that, where all these people were colliding with each other, and where this cultural moment emerged out of the collisions of all these people.”
“When he articulated it that way,” Norton continues, “I realized: It’s not a documentary. We’re not trying to imitate these people. We’re looking at what were the stakes for these people, amongst each other, that led to it being so dramatic at that moment. And why was that moment in Newport dramatic? It was because of the relationships and the stakes that had grown up between these people in the previous four years.”
One of those relationships was with Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning, who is lightly fictionalized and renamed Sylvie in the film. Although she is among the youngest of the players, Fanning had a surprising grasp of Dylan’s work before she joined the production. “I wouldn’t categorize myself as a Dylanologist, someone who knows all the facts and precisely every tour,” she says. “There are those people out there, 100%. I was just a lover of his music. From 13, I worked with Cameron Crowe on We Bought a Zoo, and he would play music all the time on set. He played “Buckets of Rain” all the time, and I didn’t know who it was. I was like, ‘What is this song? I really like it.’ So, Cameron introduced me to his work, and it was particularly the “Blood on the Tracks” album that I loved. I would listen to it as I was going to work every day. I had pictures of Bob Dylan. I wasn’t allowed to put them on my wall, but I had a cork board that I was allowed to use.” She laughs. “My mom was one of those moms.”
Is it true she even doodled his name? She laughs. “Yeah, in cursive, I wrote ‘Bob Dylan’ right here on my hand. I’m sure I have some photos of me in school [with it]. My classmates were like, ‘Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘You don’t know? You’ll have to use Google.’ So, in many ways I feel like this part was truly meant to be, because his music is so much a part of my adolescence.”
Sylvie is one of the few people in Dylan’s orbit that isn’t consumed by a passion for music. “Obviously, when you watch the movie, she’s the one character that is not as well-known as the others,” Fanning notes. She doesn’t sing and she doesn’t play an instrument. She’s purely there, and in this world—Bob’s world—rand she’ s not looking for any gains. She’s there out of a pureness of heart.”
So why the name change? “I think, in the initial draft, her name was Suze,” she recalls, “but Bob wanted to change to Sylvie. And that always stood out to me. Jim didn’t tell me exactly what he said, but I read into it; [I felt that] this must have been such a precious, sacred relationship to Bob. And so that was always, perhaps subconsciously, on my mind, wanting to honor the essence of that relationship, because she truly is the one person who knew him before he went off into the stratosphere of his mega fame as an icon. She knew him as the young boy from Minnesota with the cap. There’s a lot of importance there.”
Key to finding the character was a book that Rotolo wrote in 2008, a memoir called A Freewheelin’ Time. “That was what got me immersed into the ’60s West Village,” says Fanning. “She was an activist and really politically involved with civil rights. And she was an artist in her own right. She was a painter, very confident and sure of herself. I was aware that this part could easily slip into being just the girlfriend/partner part, and I wanted to honor her, to give her a full life and depth inside. I mean, she was really his inspiration on so many songs, like ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’. You can look it up. A lot of those songs are about Suze. She got him politically involved. He wasn’t really into politics at all until he met her, and she encouraged him to sing his own songs instead of just doing the old normal folk songs that everyone was trying to make him sing.”
“She was really his champion,” she continues, “until it became too much for her. She didn’t want a public life. And I think that’s what Bob Dylan was also trying to say when changing her name, that he felt like she never wanted to be a part of that world or be a public figure. Suze, the real-life Suze, there are interviews of her on YouTube recounting that time, and I think they were still friends up until she passed, and I watched those. But they’re only helpful up until a point. That stuff, it helps you and it serves a purpose.”
The other woman in Dylan’s, at least for the purpose of this story, is Joan Baez, already something of a folk legend when she first met Dylan in 1961. Baez is played by Monica Barbaro, who was aware Baez and Dylan growing up. “At my elementary school, we had great arts programs, and we would do this garden concert every year,” she says. “We were singing some of Joan’s songs and some of Woody Guthrie’s, like ‘This Land is Your Land’, and so a fair amount of the songs in the film were familiar to me. But they weren’t on my Spotify Most Played or anything like that! I didn’t know them that well, and I didn’t know nearly enough about her. So, this was a real gift because, immediately, even doing the most cursory research, I was blown away by all of the things she’s accomplished in her life.”
Barbaro auditioned in 2020, but, of course, production was stymied. “It was a wild moment,” she laughs. “I auditioned and I sang, and then I heard that that had gone well and that I was supposed to meet Jim the next week, but there was this pesky pandemic thing happening. They said, “Maybe in a couple weeks, when things are back to normal, you’ll meet Jim.” And as we all know, that’s not how that worked out. I didn’t actually meet him until 2023, and in the meantime I kind of obsessed over Joan and her music. At that point, I was listening to her pretty regularly, but I didn’t dive into it—really training with guitar or her voice—because the part wasn’t mine and I didn’t want too deeply connect with something that might go away.”
They finally met in 2023; immediately afterwards she received an email headed, “Joan is yours.” “I just fell on the floor,” she says. “I was so excited. I gave myself five minutes to celebrate, and then I ran to a guitar shop to get my sister’s guitar re-strung so I could start practising that day because, at the time, I only had five months to prepare. So, that was like, ‘OK, I’m ready to go, but I need to get ready.’”
As she recalls it, Mangold was quite specific about his approach to telling Dylan’s story. “Well, the thing that sat with me in particular was the way he saw this movie,” she says. “He referenced [the 1984 Miloš Forman film] Amadeus, and specifically the way you don’t get Mozart standing there telling you who he is. You understand Mozart through all of the people that are around him. You see that in a lot of documentary footage about Bob Dylan as well; you get the most information from the people who talk about themselves and the impression that he left on them.”
Once again, Mangold did not want a straight rehash of material culled from books and other movies. “My assignment, she says, “was to understand Joan as specifically as possible, and to absorb everything that she is, rather than get too caught up in the weeds on the theories about what happened when she and Bob were together, and without trying to fill in the blanks in an artificial way. Instead, I was just embodying Joan to the best of my ability, trusting Timothy’s beautiful work as Bob, and getting to be present in the moment with the words on the page and seeing what would unfold. It didn’t feel like it was overly predetermined, if that makes sense.”
Barbaro wondered whether to reach out to Baez for a long time, encouraged by Norton, who told he, “She’s lovely.” Finally, she called her up. “I went back and forth on whether I should for a while, because I admired her so much. I had had her on a pedestal. When we started filming, I did feel constricted by a sense of trying to get her right, and by my own perfectionism, I guess. I kept having dreams about her, and in the dreams, we were having a really great time, and it felt really free, and it felt like the sides of Joan that I really wanted to portray in her, her more spirited essence. And so, I think my subconscious was telling me that it would be OK to speak to her.”
Barbaro placed the call the night before she performed live in front of an audience for the first time, singing “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”. So, I was a bundle of nerves for that as well.” Baez gave the actress her blessing in a way that felt both freeing and empowering. “She said that seeking perfection is the antithesis of making anything interesting, and so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t rob her of everything that makes her interesting and spirited in the pursuit of getting everything right. She definitely gifted me that.”
For Mangold, A Complete Unknown marks a shift from two of his more recent studio movies, Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, both films dealing with a very different kind of hero. “The word hero and protagonist are super different,” he muses. “I’d definitely choose protagonist over hero [in this case]. ‘Protagonist’ being the person we’re following, ‘hero’ having all these other connotations like good and right and strong and all that sh*t.”
What does he look for in a protagonist? “Complexity, contradictions, flaws, talents.” He pauses. “I’m very, very fascinated by art-making, by people on a quest, and people who have become alienated in the world, which could incorporate everyone from what Christian Bale plays in Ford v Ferrari to what Logan feels in the world, to Bob Dylan. These are all things that are really fascinating to me, especially people with gifts that separate them from everyone else. And who can blame us, but we often look at the super-talented as lucky—and they are—but we also don’t always acknowledge the price they pay. There is a loneliness in talent. It separates you. It means no one can ever quite understand what you’re talking about sometimes, which makes them call you enigmatic, but maybe we’re just not smart enough to keep up.”
And does he feel any closer to the real Dylan, five years after the journey started? “The guy has made 55 records, all with original music on them,” he says. “So enigmatic and secretive and guarded. I wouldn’t find it easy writing 55 records of personal music and observations about the world. I think we need to get better at identifying what we expect from people. The guy has let a pretty open life, really. He just won’t open everything the way some do. And also, he’s really brilliant, so we always feel like we don’t know enough, we want to know more. But he’s been sharing an awful lot. He never has stopped sharing.”
Mangold points to the film’s opening scene, in which the young Dylan visits his hero, Woody Guthrie, as a big part of his wanting to put his faith in Dylan. “This story, which is very true, of this young man making his way to see an ailing hero and play a song he wrote for him, it’s an utterly romantic act A profoundly old-school romantic act. And it’s not going to come from someone who’s lost in narcissism. It’s not. So that immediately made me want to follow the trajectory of someone who’s that idealistic, who believed in music so hard that they’d travel this distance with nothing in their pocket to just get close and catch a spark. And how does that person become the one we know? That was kind of what the movie tries to connect with, in whatever way we manage.”
Looking back—itself a very un-Dylan-esque thing to do—how does Chalamet feel about what they managed? “I don’t know,” he says. “I know I feel like I went through a thing. That’s what Bob says at the end of Don’t Look Back. He’s leaving the Royal Albert Hall. He’s leaving a concert, and he turns to Albert Grossman, and he says, ‘I feel like I’ve just been through some kind of a… thing, right?’” He laughs. “That’s how I feel.”
A Complete Unknown is in theaters December 18th.
English (US) ·