Why I’ve made another film about Bob Dylan

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, Dylan had a famously complicated relationship with his Jewishness. His paternal grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Odessa, Ukraine, his maternal grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to the United States in 1902 and his own mother and father were part of a close-knit Jewish community in Duluth, Minnesota, where he grew up. Nevertheless, Dylan later become an evangelical Christian. Mangold was born in New York in 1963, two years before the film’s timeline concludes. I ask whether his own Jewish heritage factored into his love of Dylan. “Not at all,” he replies. “First of all, I was raised by bohemian artists [Robert and Sylvia Mangold] who had really no religion whatsoever, in the Lower East Side. And I still couldn’t tell you the Jewish holidays and when they fall! I was basically raised in an agnostic home, and have no identity, really, with any religion. At the period Bob was writing these songs, I hadn’t yet entered the world. And then by the end of the movie, I would have been two. So my relationship to Bob’s music was as a ten or 12-year-old listening to my dad’s cassette player playing greatest hits records. Plus, my mother’s side of the family are Jewish and my dad’s side are not.”

Still, Mangold has an enormous love of the music of the period. In 2005, he made one of his most critically acclaimed films Walk the Line, which detailed the life of Dylan’s compatriot, the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash. That film starred Joaquin Pheonix as the troubled country singer, while Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar for her role as Cash’s wife June Carter. Cash appears in A Complete Unknown – this time played by Boyd Holbrook, who appeared in Mangold’s Wolverine movie Logan and his 2023 action-adventure Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Mangold had no qualms about revisiting Cash for the film. “Johnny represents and embodies a kind of rebellious spirit and a kind of fearlessness about swimming against the stream. And that’s a very useful energy,” he says. “Also, I think, in one of my favourite moments in this movie… there’s just a moment where Johnny Cash takes to the stage and you see him with his band walking past Bob… and Bob’s look of utter admiration, or maybe even empathy, at Johnny Cash and his band.” The film also features other key players in the Dylan story, including an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), folkie father-figure Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the singer who sparks up a romance with Dylan. “I felt that it would be foolish to try and make the movie all about Bob,” says Mangold, who points to the Oscar-winning 1984 Mozart biopic Amadeus, made by Milos Foreman, a former teacher of Mangold’s at Columbia University. “You don’t really get to know Mozart that well in the movie, he’s kind of a force of nature. That movie is very much about this kind of awe-inspiring talent and the way it affects all the others around in the orbit of that person. In that movie, it’s [rival composer] Salieri and the king and his wife.” A Complete Unknown – which takes its title from a lyric in Dylan’s seminal track Like a Rolling Stone – does something similar, as it takes audiences up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The script, adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, climaxes at the festival where Dylan performed live with an electric guitar for the first time, much to the horror of traditional folk-loving audience. The concert was attended by Cash, Seeger and Baez, and Mangold knew he had to include these figures in the film.

Yet his reluctance to not make the film solely about Dylan might stem from the fact that the singer is so hard to pin down. Think about Todd Haynes’ 2007 biopic I’m Not There, in which Dylan was played by six different actors, including Cate Blanchett, each representing an aspect or an era of the singer’s musical journey. Mangold spent time with not only Dylan – who is now 83 – but those that knew him. But he never felt that the singer’s characteristics needed to be exposed in any way.

“I felt that it would be a mistake to try to reveal him in a conventional way. What would that mean if I were revealing him? Revealing he has childhood trauma or revealing that he’s got a phobia… I don’t know that he has a secret like that to reveal. He had a good family and a decent childhood and grew up in a lovely place and has had a very fortunate life. So it has always struck me that the thing that he was contending with was the enormity of his own talent and imagination, and how that separated him from others, in the same way that someone who is a brilliant football player or dancer or ice skater suddenly goes off in their own world in that discipline, and it separates them from others, especially if their talent is as magnificent as Bob’s is.”

Evidently, it was the right approach, as Dylan – so often a man of few words – recently posted about the film on social media site X: “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.” While Mangold has stated that Dylan has yet to see the film – and may never see it – this comment is a rare sign of approval from the singer. Perhaps all that time he spent together with Mangold warmed him to the director, who together with Chalamet truly get under Dylan’s skin.

Mangold feels Dylan had a yearning to be in a band. “The desire to be in a band increased as his success as a folk singer increased, because he felt more and more alone. Alone because of his success, but also alone on the stage. The act of performing became lonely and when he saw a band, he also saw people who were comrades, friends, and none of them wanted anything from each other than to make a good song together… and I think he was lonely. I try not to say it explicitly, but to show it. There’s a kind of effervescence to Bob, a kind of joie de vivre that you haven’t seen.” It’s a gamble that’s paid off handsomely.

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A Complete Unknown is in cinemas from today