Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown” is supposed to start filming in August, but don’t call it a Bob Dylan biopic. During a recent appearance on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast (via IndieWire), the film’s director, James Mangold, said “A Complete Unknown” is “not really a Bob Dylan biopic” but a movie. about “a very specific moment” in the New York folk scene of the 1960s. The specificity of the film is one of the reasons why the real Bob Dylan “supported us so much to do it”, explained the filmmaker.
“The best real-life movies are never cradle-to-grave, but they’re about a very specific moment,” Mangold said. “In that case, it might be presumptuous to call it Altman-esque, but it’s kind of an ensemble piece about that time, early ’60s New York, and that 17-year-old kid with $16 in his pockets hitchhikes to New York to meet Woody Guthrie who is in the hospital dying of a nervous illness, he sings Woody a song he wrote for him and bonds friendship with Pete Seeger, who is like a son to Woody, and Pete sets him up with gigs at local clubs and there you meet Joan Baez and all these other people that are part of this world.”
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Mangold described the Bob Dylan in his film as “a wanderer who comes from Minnesota with a new name and a new outlook on life”. His arrival sparked an “upheaval in the folk community and what they thought was real folk and illicit folk”.
“It all has huge relevance even now because of how we’re all so tribalized with rules about what our music should be, what our rules are, how we talk, how we express ourselves,” added Mangold. “And Bob, from the start, has always been someone who always strives to push those boundaries.”
According to Mangold, Bob Dylan’s genuine support for the film allowed him to give script notes and hold several meetings with Mangold.
“I spent several wonderfully lovely days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him,” Mangold said. “I have a screenplay that he personally annotated that I cherish. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love ‘Cop Land.'”
“Cop Land” was Mangold’s second directing effort. “A Complete Unknown” will be the director’s 13th and a return to the independent space following his studio work on “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate,” which is playing in theaters now. Bob Dylan’s film already has support from Searchlight Pictures. The film stars Elle Fanning, Benedict Cumberbatch and Boyd Holbrook.
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