Bob Dylan is a self-created enigma, an elusive Nobel Prize winner whose songs defined a ’60s protest movement before screaming into an indelible electric age. What’s known about the man is eclipsed only by the myths swirling around him.
Despite such hurdles, director James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari”) dove into a biopic about the living legend. “A Complete Unknown” (in theaters Christmas Day) captures an epochal four years − 1961 to 1965 − when Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota morphed into Bob Dylan of rock immortality. Of course, it helped that the film had the man himself along for the cinematic ride.
“Bob read the script and we had four or five meetings and he made himself available whenever I needed,” says Mangold, whose film is anchored to the 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.”
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Dylan actually helped? Impressive, given the singer’s fabled reclusiveness. Consider that the film’s star Timothée Chalamet (who spent many years preparing to sing and play like Dylan) only heard from his doppelgänger via social media earlier this month. “Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me,” Dylan, 83, wrote on X.
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“I have to say he was utterly lovely and charming and open,” Mangold insists, smiling at the memory. “Maybe it was because I wasn’t writing a book or article, but was just a fellow artist, not that I’m in that league. But he could see I wasn’t picking sides with an agenda to push, and that I was representing all the characters with respect. Since he loved them all.”
Those characters would include ailing legend Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), Dylan-inspiration-turned-girlfriend Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and banjo-playing folk icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), a who’s who of American social activist musicians.
For Norton, the movie represents not only a glimpse at Dylan’s ascent but also a chance for younger generations to understand a pivotal moment in the nation’s history. “These people all were so involved in the critical social debates of their time, and it’s harder and harder to see that now,” he says. “I hope through this movie people dig deeper and look into that past.”
Another key player in the drama is Dylan’s first New York girlfriend Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning, who at Dylan’s request appears as a character with a different name, Sylvie Russo. While she wasn’t a musician, Rotolo helped fire Dylan’s lyrical activism.
“Their relationship was a pure one, so I think he was protective of her,” Mangold says of Dylan’s request for the name change. “It was clear to me he still has fondness for Suze, even though she’s passed, since she was an early love in his life before he was Bob Dylan.”
For ‘A Complete Unknown,’ director James Mangold sought to avoid biopic tropes
Dylan has had a remarkable career arc, from solo troubadour to rebel rocker to devout Christian to raspy raconteur. In recounting only those early years, Mangold elected to tell the story of colliding young lives.
“You’ve got a vagabond arriving in New York, reinventing himself with $10 in his pocket, with a song in his Moleskine notebook that he wants to sing for his hero (Guthrie) who’s in a hospital in New Jersey,” he says. “It sounds like a movie just in describing the reality of its opening moments.”
Mangold’s movie focuses on unseen sparks, such as “two people singing ‘Blowin’ in Wind’ in their underwear in Greenwich Village with a garbage truck outside the window,” he says. “That moment to me is awesome. It’s counterintuitive when you consider the cultural impact of the song, but of course, the players of those songs didn’t know the cultural impact when they created them.”
The cast of the Bob Dylan movie learned to sing and play instruments
Core cast members spent upward of a year on voice and music lessons. “I played guitar, but that’s easy compared to banjo,” jokes Norton, noting that Seeger’s claw-hammer picking technique was hard to master.
But more than learning to play that instrument, Norton went out of his way to understand Seeger’s friendly if reserved demeanor.
“There’s a scene in the movie where Dylan reconnects with Seeger after a while, so I asked Joan (Baez), if you and Pete hadn’t seen each other, would you hug?” Norton says, laughing. “She said, ‘Oh, God, no! We were hippies, he was from the Depression era. That banjo was his shield.’ She described him to me as a Calvinist preacher.”
Baez also helped Barbaro shape her portrayal of the singer, who was already famous (Time put her on its cover in 1962) when her relationship with a little-known Dylan picked up steam.
“I hesistated to reach out to her at first, because I had put her on a pedestal,” says Barbaro, who learned guitar from scratch for the part. “But I was having dreams about this, and thought I needed to meet her. Joan is a bold person, so I thought if she were me, she’d reach out, and I did.”
The resulting conversation helped Barbaro shift away from doing an impression of Baez. “Something about talking to her allowed me to finally shed that layer of tension and tight control over getting it right, and just being me,” she says.
For Mangold, the film was about finding a new Bob Dylan space outside of D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Don’t Look Back,” Martin Scorsese’s epic 2005 film “No Direction Home,” or Dylan’s own surrealist 2004 autobiography “Chronicles: Volume One.”
“In many ways, this all was a fairytale,” he says. “I just wanted to get to know these people at that time and let the uniqueness of the moments and the music and their rivalries and loves and jealousies play out.”