In A Complete Unknown we meet Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan as a hitchhiking fanboy, singing to his hero Woody Guthrie at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey in 1961. Within two and a half years, he’s on his way to being the voice of a generation as he sings from the podium at the Lincoln Memorial before Martin Luther King Jr delivers his ‘I have a dream’ speech at the March on Washington.
Director James Mangold’s eagerly awaited Bob Dylan biopic is with us. For this week’s cover story, Mangold talks to Big Issue about Dylan’s seismic impact on the world, and how Timothée Chalamet rose to the task of playing a musical icon like no other – in a film that introduces Dylan to a brand new age group.
“This is a movie about people communicating about love and life and injustice and passion and frustration and philosophical ambiguities through the meat and potatoes of a man or woman’s voice, words and a guitar. And that is really powerful to me. Because I miss it. I feel like I need it,” says Mangold.
Alongside Mangold’s insights, we take a deep dive into the Big Issue archives, with reflections on Dylan from Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson and more.
What else is in this week’s issue?
Flood Mary is helping when the river comes rolling in
As people across the country begin to rebuild from devastating floods at the start of the year, one woman has hard-earned wisdom on how to get through: Flood Mary.
Mary Long-Dhonau has met with thousands of flood victims over the last 20 years. “It has made me the kind of person that I am, donning the welly boots and starting protesting, saying this shouldn’t be happening and floodwater shouldn’t be violating my home. I got to know how other people were suffering and it drove me to keep going. I was focused on that rather than the trauma. It was because I had a focus that I managed to cope with it,” Long-Dhonau says.
