In A Complete Unknown from Searchlight Pictures, James Mangold takes audiences on a transformative journey into the early life of Bob Dylan, showcasing the enigmatic artist before his rise to superstardom. Known for his Oscar-winning Walk the Line, a biopic of music legend Johnny Cash, Mangold expertly revisits the genre, cementing his reputation as a storyteller who excels at directing masterful performances from actors not typically known for their musical chops.
Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of Dylan is a revelation, embodying the folk legend’s charisma and internal struggles with an authenticity that borders on eerie. Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro also deliver standout performances, while Elle Fanning adds another layer with her portrayal of a composite muse—a character who offers insight into Dylan’s personal life and creative process.
Audiences will likely be amazed by the fact that the actors perform their songs live on camera, benefitting from an extended filming period due to COVID and the Hollywood strikes to hone their craft. Their performances are so convincing that I found myself impatiently waiting for the next song, as if I were at an actual Dylan concert or folk music festival. AwardsFocus editor Matthew Koss was also a big fan of the movie, awarding it a rare A+ grade. [See his review here!]
In today’s landscape of finicky moviegoers, making biopics about artists who rose to popularity six decades ago is a significant cinematic risk. However, Mangold delivers a film worthy of a Christmas Day opening—one that generations of music fans will enjoy. “When I made the Johnny Cash movie (Walk the Line), I knew I had to appeal to fans and newcomers alike,” Mangold explains. “It’s the same with Dylan. The goal is to create something that speaks to everyone—skeptics, superfans, and everyone in between.”
With its stellar performances and Mangold’s masterful direction, A Complete Unknown is a strong contender for this year’s awards circuit. James Mangold spoke with AwardsFocus about the challenges of balancing historical accuracy with emotional storytelling, Chalamet’s uncanny performance, and one of his main cinematic inspirations, Amadeus.
Awards Focus: Congratulations James. The film is mesmerizing. How did you approach making this film, knowing that you had to appeal to lifelong Dylan fans as well as the younger audiences an actor like Timothée Chalamet attracts?
James Mangold: Well, a movie, while not purely interactive, still has to play for different kinds of people, right? You know, even when I made the Johnny Cash movie (Walk the Line) decades ago, I was aware that I was going to be making a movie that Johnny Cash fans would see, but also that millions of people who knew nothing about Johnny Cash—or, even more importantly, people who actually didn’t like country music—would be watching. And so you’re very aware that you’re going to have to speak to people who may be skeptical or ignorant about what it is that you’re showing them.
Obviously, we have to be accurate historically, but in a way, I view every movie the same—fiction or nonfiction—in the sense that my job is to grab you. My job is to pull you into the characters, lean in, and have you try to figure out what’s going on, how they’re feeling, if you like them, and want to follow them. If I keep my eye on the ball and just try to make a good movie, and if the movie functions the way movies can, it can reach everybody 100%.
AF: This project has been quite the journey—spanning years, even through a strike or two. You’ve immersed yourself in Dylan’s life and legacy, and you’ve had the rare opportunity to speak with him. How has your perception of Bob Dylan evolved from the start of this film to where you are today?
Mangold: It’s almost six years now. Well, my perception of him when I started was entirely like anybody else’s—just what I could derive from listening to the records, reading interviews, and watching the great documentaries made about him. But it was not unlike the process on Walk the Line. You know, I got this movie, and it gave me the additional honor—besides the joy of making the film—of sitting in a coffee shop with Bob, talking for hours about his life, the script, and everything in between.
A lot of the enigmatic mystique vanished because I just saw a guy being very straightforward with me about what he felt during that period of his life. Remember, that’s—I mean, there are several things that are hard because we all think of Bob now as the icon. But the Bob we were making a movie about was pre-icon Bob; the story ends with him becoming a star.
And there’s not as much documentation—fewer interviews—because he wasn’t known yet when he arrived in New York. There were some scattered things Timmy and I studied fastidiously, but Bob filled in a lot of cracks for me, and I shared what he had to say with Timmy and others.
The most interesting part to me was his sense of bewilderment about what exactly went down. Much like someone older, like myself, looking back—he’s 19 years old when the movie begins—trying to understand actions that were so instinctual and impulsive. There wasn’t necessarily a master plan.
For instance, his attraction to being in a band wasn’t something that developed over time. The kid who arrived in New York dreamed of being Buddy Holly. He loved Little Richard and Johnny Cash, and the idea of being a solo folk singer wasn’t his entire plan or dream.
So, the decision to go electric was much less about rejecting something and more about moving toward something he’d always dreamed of, if that makes sense. On a human level, what I loved was when he said, “It’s very lonely being on stage alone with a guitar for two hours. It’s lonely being in a studio alone with your guitar. It’s so much fun to be in a studio with other musicians.”
You realize, especially for the Bob Dylan who had just become a star, everyone suddenly wanted something from him. Many of the relationships in his life became transactional. But the relationships with other guitar players, keyboard players, drummers, and bassists were really pure. Bob related to me that much of his attraction to working with bands and other musicians came less from wanting to change everything and more from a deeply felt loneliness.
AF: Timothée Chalamet was remarkable in the role. When you were writing the screenplay, was he already in your mind as Bob Dylan? How did the decision to cast him come about?
Mangold: I came in writing for Timmy. Timmy wasn’t on the movie when I came on, but, literally, it all happened within days. Meaning, I first heard about this book and this project coming to Searchlight in 2019, I believe.
When is Telluride—Labor Day weekend? And then a week later is Toronto, right? Or about five days later, right? So I grabbed ahold of this thing pretty hard. I didn’t even have a deal, but I was like, I’m going to make this movie.
Then we got to Toronto a week and a half later, and I met with Timmy, who was there supporting his movie. I was there with Ford v Ferrari, and I met with him there. We committed to doing it together, and we were off to the races. And for the last six years, we’ve been working on it together.
AF: What was it like the first time you heard Timothée embody Bob Dylan—his voice, his singing, his guitar playing?
Mangold: Well, you have to remember, it’s an ever-evolving thing where he’s getting better and better over five or six years. But the very first moment I heard him, it was over FaceTime. We were just reading a scene, some new pages I had written. He was reading, obviously, the Bob part, and I was reading whoever else—Sylvie or Pete or both. And he just started falling into Bob.
Of course, I was so excited, you know, the way he dropped in. I mean, it’s kind of a miracle. It’s how actors become movie stars. It isn’t just being young and beautiful; there’s an incredible skill set and talent. Timmy is a rarity, and those moments were thrilling, to be honest, because I could see the movie lying before us.
AF: Since you mentioned the studio, I wanted to ask about a particular scene—when Bob is recording and brings in the whistle. It feels almost like a blooper reel, with him trying not to laugh as others do. Watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder: was this scene based on actual footage, closely recreating what happened, or was it improvised? It felt so effortless and authentic.
Mangold: It is not based on footage that we have, but it’s based on a true story of how the whistle—he bought it from a street vendor and was banging around—and he had the idea of putting it in Highway 61. That is how it got in the song.
AF: As Chalamet continued to perfect his Dylan impression and musical skill, did it change the ultimate kind of final look of the movie in terms of how much you incorporated his performances, knowing that you could lean heavily into that?
Mangold: We even have more I shot—I couldn’t stop shooting him singing. But the reality is, yes. I always felt like one of the ways we could avoid the biopic tropes that have gotten a little clichéd was to allow the music to play more and to watch the music being born in a more organic way.
Not just, you know, counting four and suddenly it sounds like the needle has been dropped on a hit record. You’re really feeling the way these words volcanically came out of him, feeling the birth of what he was channeling and where this was coming from.
That was really fascinating to me, and I felt like a way to avoid making a movie with all these historical markers, little subtitles on the screen, and telling you which famous concert this is. We really do none of that, other than telling you the year at the beginning and the year at the end.
It’s up to you to figure out when he’s at Carnegie Hall, when he’s at Town Hall, when he’s at Gerde’s or the Gaslight, and even which Newport it is.
For me, that was trying to… when we make a fiction film, we don’t get involved in the dispensation of information. We’re involved in the suspension of disbelief and your connection with the characters. So when you’re making a movie about real-life people, you go, “Well, that should be my focus still, right?”
One of the ways to avoid the tropes of a biopic is to avoid the Wikipedia history lesson quality of them. That’s two things: one is not spoon-feeding bullet points of information to your audience, but the other is also focusing the movie on a very succinct part of this person’s life where it makes story sense. Not trying to do a cradle-to-grave story, which then becomes more about chronicling all these important events in their life, but not about sustaining a movie that feels like a character piece that holds together in one time and place.
AF: Shifting gears slightly, I’d love to discuss the relationships in the movie—the ones Dylan had throughout his life. Was there a particular relationship, perhaps with Joan Baez or someone else, that you were most excited to explore on screen?
Mangold: Well, one of my theories—one of the things I wanted to do when I first came on the movie in 2019—was to institute what I called the kind of Amadeus structure, if you will.
I didn’t think Bob had some deep secret you could uncover. Like, Johnny Cash had this tremendous guilt over the death of his brother and shame about being there—or not being there, in fact—when he died, having left him alone with this buzz saw.
For me, I didn’t feel that was something I was going to do. I wasn’t going to be able to create the kind of Good Will Hunting confessional third act where Bob Dylan suddenly explains to us what’s driving him and what hurts him. So if you’re not doing that kind of Freudian revelation or classical Ordinary People structure, then you’re really saying, “I’m going to allow this character to still be somewhat enigmatic.” You’re going to learn what you’re going to learn.
What they did so well in Amadeus—excuse me, what Peter Shaffer did so well, and my great mentor Milos Forman did so well—is that the movie may be called Amadeus, but Mozart isn’t the character you follow in every scene.
AF: Thank you so much for the time today and congratulations once again on the fantastic film!