The Impressionistic Bob Dylan Biopic

Bob Dylan is notoriously averse to others poking around in his past – he once suggested the legions of self-styled “Dylanologists” who examine his career in forensic detail should “get a life, please … you’re wasting your life”. So when he summoned the director James Mangold to meet him and discuss the Dylan biopic Mangold was making, it had the potential to go badly.

The film, A Complete Unknown, was already well under way. A script based on the folk musician and writer Elijah Wald’s acclaimed 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! had been written by Jay Cocks, best known as the screenwriter of Gangs of New York. Timothée Chalamet was slated to star as Dylan: perfect for the role, Mangold suggests, because “he’s thin and wiry and mercurial and super smart and restless and he’s also a really fucking good actor”.

Meanwhile, Mangold had set about rewriting, amplifying “the personal relationships” in the story, so that Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo, a character based on Dylan’s then girlfriend Suze Rotolo, became “monumentally larger roles”. This decision, he says tactfully, “caused some concern in the Dylan camp”. Not that Dylan had read any version of the script: as Wald was informed, when he inquired whether the singer had shown any interest in his book: “Bob doesn’t read about Dylan.”

But then Covid brought Dylan’s fabled “never ending tour” to a temporary halt. He requested a copy of the script his people were worried about and Mangold went to meet him in a coffee shop. Initially, Dylan seemed more interested in discussing Cop Land, Mangold’s 1997 drama about police corruption, than the film being made about his own life, which charts Dylan’s dramatic rise through the folk scene of Greenwich Village to international stardom, and on to the quite extraordinary level of consternation he caused by switching to electric guitar and performing with a backing band.

But, says Mangold, then he suddenly changed tack. “He said: ‘So what’s this movie about?’ And I thought very carefully, because I knew he didn’t want a 20-minute answer. I said: ‘It’s about a young guy in Minnesota who’s suffocating and feeling desperate and who leaves everything – friends, family – behind and, with just a few dollars in his pocket, makes his way across the country and creates a new identity and makes new friends, finds a new family and blossoms, becomes successful, then starts to suffocate again and runs away.’ And he smiled and that was all. Like, he didn’t have anything more to say, but I knew that meant, to me, that he didn’t take issue.”

The pair had a couple more meetings, although Mangold is cagey about what they discussed – “The story, my focus, what I was trying to say,” he says, vaguely – before Dylan “disappeared” again. He was conspicuous by his absence from A Complete Unknown’s premiere, although he did offer a tweet calling Chalamet “a brilliant actor … I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”

But the film hardly needs its subject’s endorsement. Early reviews have been largely rhapsodic. Chalamet has been tipped for an Oscar for his remarkable performance – singing and playing live, he inhabits Dylan’s voice in a way that is almost uncanny – although it’s worth pointing out that he is just part of a hugely impressive cast. Edward Norton is great as Seeger, struggling to maintain his soft-spoken sagacity as Dylan outgrows his influence, while Elle Fanning brings the shadowy figure of Russo/Rotolo to life: smart, aggrieved and substantially more politically committed than Dylan himself.

Monica Barbaro, meanwhile, absolutely nails Baez’s formidable character and the crystalline purity of her vocals despite having no musical background, little personal connection to folk (“In elementary school, we would sing This Land Is Your Land and, like, Kumbaya, but I didn’t have much of a deep relationship with it,” she says) and having to endure what sounds like the deeply disconcerting experience of a phone call from Baez “the night before I had to perform Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, the first song I sang and played in front of an audience and the hardest song to play, guitar-wise.

“I struggled with this feeling of just so much gratitude for everything she’s done and for being willing to speak to me and how much I admire her – I tried to let that get out of the way and just have a conversation, but that’s hard,” she says.

“Having studied her voice so closely – her speaking voice, every interview in the 60s – and then hearing Joan’s voice now in her 80s, in real time, speaking to me, was an incredibly emotional experience: really cool and kind of mind-blowing.

“But she was really not fussed about the film, truly. I think I was more concerned on her behalf than she was for herself. I was sort of saying: you deserve your own biopic! So many biopics with different chapters of your life! And she said: ‘I’m just sitting in my back yard watching the birds.’ You know: I lived it, I did it.”

You could, if you were so minded, pick nits about the way it plays fast and loose with the facts, although Wald – whose book makes him better placed to note discrepancies than most – thinks the liberties the film takes are in keeping with telling the story.

“The movie is full of things that didn’t happen, but the way they happen in those scenes feels right to me,” he says. “If Pete Seeger had been at Woody Guthrie’s bedside when Dylan arrived and sung him a song, then said he didn’t have a place to sleep, Pete would have brought him home for the night. None of that happened, but it’s all true to the characters … if people are essentially asking me: ‘Wouldn’t you rather it was a duller movie that was truer to your book?’ then no, I wouldn’t.”

And to its immense credit, A Complete Unknown isn’t hagiographic in its account of Dylan’s rise to fame. As he rapidly ascends from Seeger’s young protege to the folk scene’s brightest star, to an artist who single-handedly alters the face of pop music, you are left in no doubt of Dylan’s genius – it’s very good at capturing the shock and awe of audiences encountering Blowin’ in the Wind or The Times They Are A-Changin’ not as august standards, but freshly written material.

But Mangold says one of his inspirations was Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s 1984 movie about the life of Mozart, “a film about genius and the way all of us react to genius, which is with admiration and some resentment; where the characters around Mozart are really significant and the wake the genius leaves upon them is as important as anything we learn about him”.

Certainly, A Complete Unknown portrays Dylan as a bit of a pain in the arse, mercurial to the point of treating friends and lovers in a cavalier manner, and an Olympic-standard fibber to boot: Baez and Russo go from vying for his affections to independently tiring of his bullshit. “I’ve had friends who’ve seen the film and said: ‘Oh God, I loved it when you threw him out of your hotel room!’” laughs Barbaro. “That scene is like a bit of therapy for a lot of women. But I also appreciate that it is not necessarily saying he’s doing the wrong thing at any given moment. There’s that push and pull throughout; it’s not trying to dictate what the audience feels.”

There are moments when A Complete Unknown seems like a eulogy for when Greenwich Village was a bohemian outpost in the centre of Manhattan: “This magical place,” as Mangold puts it, who grew up there in the 60s “before every apartment was worth $10m … when there was no such thing as cell phones or computers … you wanna be there, right?”

But equally, there are resonances that are relevant to the 21st century. For one thing, Mangold sees it as a story about “tribal politics and tribal cultural issues”: it opens with the folk scene deemed such a threat to the American establishment that Seeger is literally on trial – he refused to answer questions before the McCarthy-era House Committee on Un-American Activities and, in real life, was sentenced to a year in prison (overturned on appeal) – and ends with the folk scene as establishment in itself, with “Bob as a threat to it”, Mangold says. “Obviously, the movie is about a lot of people on the left, but it’s also about intolerance for anyone who breaches the code, whether you’re on the left or the right.”

And then there is the issue of Dylan’s thorny relationship with celebrity, which Mangold says he sees reflected in the actor who plays him: “Over the five years I’ve known him, Timmy’s been negotiating for himself his own comfort level with fame, so he’s living through his own version of that moment.” That said, it’s worth noting that even Chalamet’s experience of celebrity, replete with gossipy speculation about a succession of A-list girlfriends, pales compared with Dylan’s.

As Wald says, Dylan “always wanted to be a rock star, ever since he was in high school”, only swiftly to reconsider once he became famous, perhaps because of the nature of the fame he attained. “Dylan never signed up to be the voice of a generation and it reached an absolutely insane level very quickly,” says Wald. “There was a crazy cover of Esquire magazine that put him together with Fidel Castro, John F Kennedy and Malcolm X – there was no way to predict that a pop star would ever be put in that position. And let’s not forget that two of those people had been shot. Baez certainly felt he was intensely scared by crowds grabbing at him, but it was a genuinely scary time.”

With that “voice of a generation” tag came a troubling level of adulation that also seems oddly modern. We tend to think of toxic fandom as a product of the internet age, where social media has increased the proximity of fans to artists and with it given a sense of entitlement and ownership. But it’s hard to think of a fandom more toxic than Dylan’s in the 60s, sections of which first took to booing him and comparing him to Judas, or calling him “a bastard” because he had changed musical direction, and then set about making his life a misery: picketing his home, attempting to break in, rifling through his rubbish, coming up with absurd theories about his politics and drug use.

“I wanted to set fire to these people,” wrote Dylan in Chronicles, a book that also revealed he had taken to keeping a pistol and a rifle at home as a result of his fear of “rogue radicals”.

Equally, it feels a very long time indeed since pop music of any kind was freighted with such importance that an artist electing to change the type of guitar he played could provoke uproar. You could view A Compete Unknown as a film less about Dylan and more about a climate in which art was thought to have the power to effect social change. There is, then, something ironic about it being released in a climate that suggests the exact opposite: it arrives just after an election in the US in which all the high‑profile artistic endorsements of the Democratic candidate apparently did nothing whatsoever to convince voters.

But when I mention that, Mangold demurs. No, he says, he thinks art still has the power to change things: “Maybe even more so, because information has certainly ceased to be able to move anyone. People no longer trust information, but at least metaphor, emotion and imagination may still have a way, since it exists in a place that already is known to be not exactly factual. You don’t even have to shine that light on it, you can just feel it – and someone can be changed by what they feel.”

A Complete Unknown is released on 25 December in the US, 17 January in the UK and 23 January in Australia