Biographical movies by their very existence aim to unpack, to reveal, to make transparent.
Everything, in other words, that Bob Dylan has tried to avoid in his 60-plus years in the cultural spotlight.
That made James Mangold‘s job in A Complete Unknown — about Dylan’s early years ahead of his bombshell switch to electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival — very tricky.
As the Timothée Chalamet film prepares to roll out on Christmas Day — and as Dylan himself weighs in (“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,” he recently tweeted) — THR caught up with Mangold, who wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks, for his thoughts on the enigmatic music man.
Let’s start with the tweet. I assume that was a surprise?
Yes. No one said, “Dylan tweet incoming!” It was thrilling and funny and warm and charming, as Bob is. Even his way of dipping his toe in the world of tweeting is highly amusing and makes you chuckle.
And very cut-to-the-chase — he ended the post with “After you’ve seen the movie read the book” [Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, on which the movie is based].
Bob is very “cut to the chase.” I love it because so am I. Tell me the answer. Don’t sugarcoat it.
And yet there’s also his ambiguity and slipperiness, which even he alludes to in the tweet. The question that runs through our mind often whenever we see Dylan represented: “Is it really him? What’s him and what’s performance?”
The film is an interpretation. It can be nothing but an interpretation. But even documentary footage is only a version of him because he’s totally aware that they’re shooting him. So he’s actually the actor in those situations, performing for the lens.
That makes your job really hard. How do you craft a film about someone so eager to stay out of reach — how did you deal with the opaqueness when a biography is meant to reveal?
It’s a very interesting problem, but it’s also a problem solved by meeting him. I don’t feel like he’s opaque. I just feel like we want more than he can provide, so we’ve assigned him this opaque or enigmatic identity. And Bob has enough P.T. Barnum in him to say, “I’ll go with that.” The reality is he’s shared a shitload with us. If you think of songs as part of the movie’s text, Bob is a kind of third screenwriter, or maybe a first screenwriter. We have 26 monologues from him. No one denies the songs are personal, yet we still call him opaque.
That may be because the songs are opaque.
They can be, but that’s what makes for great art. I think he’s saying, “After the album comes out, that’s my gift and that’s where it ends.” He’s not doing videos that show him buying ice cream at CVS. We don’t have to understand how they relate in a conventional, Freudian way to his personality. I deeply identify with an artist’s hesitancy to go down the rabbit hole because the thirst is never-ending.
Let’s talk about the big reinvention. He defies his mentor, the folk artist Pete Seeger, to go electric at the festival, which underscores one of the movie’s big questions, the timeless theme of when is an artist beautifully expanding who they are and when are they just being vain?
We see it as a reinvention, and yet I don’t really feel he was ever thinking about this in terms of his career. He came to New York loving Buddy Holly and Little Richard and Johnny Cash, and none of those are solo folk artists.
I’m not sure his desire to have a band was as much about legacy and reinvention as what he told me it was about, which is loneliness. How lonely it is to be an artist onstage with a guitar, as a folk artist often is. So I think the more successful he got, the more attractive a band got. It brought camaraderie. It wasn’t transactional, like so many relationships in his life had become. They were just making music.
You’re saying we underestimate the personal factors here.
Yes. I think of Newport 1965 as a Thanksgiving dinner run amok. At its core it was a family fight: a prodigal son pushing away a controlling father and set of boundaries he can no longer live with. An emotional convulsion, not a cultural revolution.
Also, even now, I’m not sure Bob knows why.
Really?
He doesn’t. He says, “I still don’t really understand it.”
What does he think of how you depicted the reasons in the film?
He hasn’t seen the film. He’s welcome to. All he’d have to do is call. But [Dylan’s manager] Jeff Rosen says he doesn’t think he’s ever watched any of the documentaries about him. That’s a clue too, isn’t it? Into a kind of self-protection, a protection of one’s own psyche that I think he’s zealously practiced for years.
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
