A Complete Unknown director James Mangold on why Bob Dylan is proof you should always meet your heroes

The ascent of Bob Dylan was staggering. And writer-director James Mangold’s new biopic, which charts the first few years of Dylan’s career, hits all the storytelling beats to showcase both his dizzying rise and the suffocating pressures that accompanied it.  

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 January 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.  

By July 1965, at the electrifying denouement of the film, Mangold shows Dylan plugging in his Fender Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival and sparking the end of his mentor Pete Seeger’s dream that Dylan’s words would unite a nation around righteous political acoustic music. Dylan released his game changing sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited, a month later. 

“The output of this young man between the ages of 19 and 24 is staggering,” says Mangold. “It only fully dawned on me when we completed the film. You can take the songs you hear in the movie and multiply them by five. There’s so many great ones we left on the side of the road just because I couldn’t make a six-hour movie.

“But Bob Dylan was not only prolific, the work was staggeringly timeless and relevant. And his way of writing means the work still speaks to us. It’s not dated. It’s not lost in another time.” 

Asked why these songs remain so relevant, Mangold begins by talking about his filmmaking methodology, describing himself as a “classicist”, an “old-school filmmaker” and “a little bit of a misfit”. Why? Because, he says, of an insistence on resistance to “style or visual branding” over actual storytelling.  

“Where am I getting to with this answer? It’s that part of the appeal of folk music to me is that it’s not about the production or adornment. There isn’t a fig leaf of dazzle or sizzle to hide behind,” he says. 

“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.   

• The 80 best Bob Dylan songs – with not a greatest hit in sight
• Bob Dylan: Celebrating a career that changed the world
• If Bob Dylan tells us it’s time for joy, we’d better pay attention

“And the world our movie inhabits and kind of re-animates is one where people were still fighting for attention, but it was coming from passion and commitment and craft. We can talk all day about genius and vision, but craft is also really important. Excellence in fabrication, whether it’s a table, a chair, a song or a car, is something that is lost, or feels harder to find in this world.

“This is a movie about visionaries, revolutionaries and eccentrics, yes, but also great craftspeople.” 

No secrets to conceal

Mangold met Dylan countless times before filming began on the new biopic. While we are sometimes warned not to meet our heroes, the writer-director had a joyous experience with Dylan.    

“We met in a coffee shop that was closed for Covid, and we just sat down and talked for five hours,” he says, when he calls Big Issue from the Pacific Coast Highway. “We did the same over a series of dates after that. And they were just lovely conversations in which he was anything but guarded. He answered any question I had. I was a curious artist asking questions, many of which he’d never been asked before, rather than a biographer setting down something to be put in print. There’s a kind of emotional reality that I’ve got to kind of capture – and he was incredibly helpful with that.”  

If Mangold had done his homework over decades of listening to Dylan’s music, so had the singer.  

“He revealed to me many things that took any of the anxiety out of meeting him. He’s a huge film fan, so he had seen almost all my movies. He waxed on about how he loved Cop Land and Sylvester Stallone and the final gunfight in that movie. He’s got encyclopaedic knowledge of not just all kinds of music, but movies and art and literature. It’s quite something to behold.” 

So presumably, he’d seen Mangold’s Walk the Line – starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Oscar-winning Reese Witherspoon as June Carter? 

“He liked it. And I imagine it gave him some sense of confidence in the endeavour I was about to start on following his young story,” says Mangold. 

Dylan not only had an input into the story but has also become something of a cheerleader for the project. 

“It’s joyful,” says Mangold. “He’s been nothing but a positive force. There was a moment when I was writing the script when some people were getting nervous that it was veering too much from a simple story of folk versus rock into the personal side of his life.  

“Bob asked to read the script, reacted positively, and gave me the green light to continue, and that includes depictions of misbehaviour. He sees himself with a clear eye.  

“He also sees it as the actions of a very young man. He’s now in his 80s, there’s enough distance that he doesn’t feel defensive. They were a bunch of kids. Seeing Timmy’s youth inhabiting this character brings a wisdom and understanding to the behaviour, because you are reminded that you’re talking about a 20-year-old man.” 

There’s a startling moment when Chalamet, as Dylan, is piecing together the song that will become Girl from the North Country. A song that previously did not exist is magicked from the air and, just for a second, it is as though we are witness to a moment of cosmic creation, a star being born. 

“No one in the room has any idea that these are anything more than just good songs,” says Mangold. “People were astounded at what was coming out of this young man. But great art starts somewhere humble and modest. I also loved watching him and Monica [Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez] singing Blowin’ in The Wind in their underwear on a bed. It takes all the historical importance out of these moments.”  

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Great art from humble beginnings it might be. But Dylan’s music, and his story, is also big business. The film rights to Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald were first optioned – by Bob Dylan’s management company – in 2015. Five years later, Dylan sold the publishing rights to his songwriting back catalogue in a deal with Universal worth more than $300m. Sony subsequently bought his entire recorded output (past, present and multiple future releases) for around $150m – promising to find “new ways to make his music available to his many fans today and to future generations”.

Well, now they are recouping some of that huge outlay as A Complete Unknown and Chalamet introduce Dylan’s music to a huge new audience. Gen Z is digging it. Bob Dylan Core (teenagers walking down the street in thin jackets, hunching over against the cold à la The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover, soundtracked by Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right) preceded the film, becoming a TikTok trend in 2023. 

But the music is where the big bucks are, and chart expert Hugh McIntyre says he is “on track to return to charts in a number of Western markets” as the movie is released worldwide. The week the new film was released in the US, six Bob Dylan albums entered the iTunes US Top 100 Albums chart – with Highway 61 Revisited at number nine. The film’s soundtrack album was also in the Top 20. The idea that younger viewers might come for the thrill of seeing Timothée Chalamet on the big screen but stay with Dylan’s songs for a lifetime thrills Mangold.  

“I’m one of those geeks who loves to play a record for someone that they haven’t heard before,” he says. “So it’s the ultimate act of playlisting to be introducing the under-30 crowd to this treasure trove of songwriting and meaning and feeling and poetry.”

How does it feel to play Bob Dylan?

Mangold has no truck with ideas of Dylan as an enigmatic figure, however. “He’s written so much music you can hardly really call him enigmatic,” he says.  

But making the film made him question why audiences always demand more from those in the public eye.  

“Bob Dylan’s prolific gift to us is so much expression, so many songs,” he says. “I always think, isn’t the gift enough? Why are we unsatisfied? It’s a kind of never-ending hamster wheel in which we’re always hungry to know more. But there’s so much self-revelatory music that is so deeply personal.  

“It became so clear how the music is so affected by what was going on, even on the micro level of his relationships with Suze [Rotolo – renamed as Sylvie Russo in the film, at Dylan’s request] and Joan [Baez] and the turbulence of the world at the time, the pressures of the folk scene. 

“Positively 4th Street is such a direct expression of a young man trying to cope with an enormous amount of pressure and expectation to the point that he’s almost considered a kind of prophet. Who’s to say what the appropriate human response to that kind of attention is when it only occurs to such a great few?” 

While it’s true few have received the attention and acclaim that was aimed at Dylan during this period, Chalamet may have more idea than most about how it feels to be critically acclaimed and beloved by your audience.  

The actor had already received an Oscar nomination for Call Me by Your Name and impressed in Beautiful Boy, The King and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and Little Women when this film was first announced in 2020. By the time it was filmed, he’d also shot The French Dispatch, Dune parts one and two and Wonka. “He has the experience of growing up in a kind of media hurricane,” says Mangold.

“But the added pressure that Bob had that even Timmy would acknowledge is that Bob’s a writer and creator. So he’s not just being loved for a performance but as a kind of singular, unified demigod. Even Timmy can only approximate that. But you’re very right, all our performers have had a taste in the film world of what this kind of energy can be like and how hard it is to cope – not only with an audience’s disapproval or expectations, but also how hard it is to even cope with adoration. However positive it is, how do you process it and how it fits into your life in any kind of normal, functional way as a young person?” 

The freewheelin’ Chalamet rises to the challenge of playing both Dylan and his songs. Whether showing snippets of the songwriting process or live performances from the bars of Greenwich Village to the big stage at Newport Folk Festival, Chalamet is compelling.  

“When Timmy sang Song to Woody in that scene with Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie in the hospital bed, his live performance was just electrifying,” says Mangold. “The intensity. The sense of determination of this young man to deliver this song he’d written in Hibbing, Minnesota for his hero – it’s such a romantic notion. 

“This young nobody arriving in town – with $20 in his pocket, a guitar and a notebook with the fragments of what will become the greatest songs of the century written inside – and turning the world of music upside down. 

“That’s why I had such a determination to make this movie. It was the beauty of that fable.”  

A Complete Unknown is in cinemas from 17 January.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.