Heading into its Dec. 25 theatrical release with Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards nominations, Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown is one of the most highly anticipated performances of the year. Also featuring Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (based on Dylan’s ex-girlfriend Suze Rotolo), the film is a look at Dylan’s rise to fame.
The movie takes place in the 1960s, starting with a 19-year-old Dylan moving from Minnesota to New York and meeting Guthrie, his music icon, while Guthrie was hospitalized for Huntington’s disease. Dylan established his career among artists in Greenwich Village, amid extensive anti-war and civil rights activism.
James Mangold’s movie tracks Dylan’s journey from struggling folk artist to rock-and-roll superstar, including his evolving relationships with romantic partners Baez and Russo. The film ends at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan “goes electric,” playing his electric guitar and rock songs to the crowd, to the chagrin of folk purists.
‘They’re so iconic, why are we doing this?’
Dylan’s life has been covered extensively, from books to documentaries, including Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. For Norton, who’s a fan of Dylan’s art, it was Mangold’s approach to the story that gave the actor the confidence that A Complete Unknown is a worthy addition to projects about Dylan’s life, and the other talented artists around him.
“Any hesitations I had about the whole thing, that were just born of … my own sort of precious relationship with that music, or the weight of the idea of playing people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. They’re so iconic, why are we doing this? Jim laid the field for the validity of it by making it not documentary and not history,” Norton told Yahoo Canada
“He said, I want to look at the collisions between people that create these emergent moments of creativity, and I want to look at different kinds of integrity that coexist without canceling each other out. The emotional messiness of the fact that people love each other and admire each other, and still go in different directions. Jim humanized all of it for all of us. … He just did a beautiful job evading the biopic form, in a way, and … it’s almost a piece of cultural anthropology, more than it is a biopic.”
For Mangold and Chalamet, it was a five-year collaboration to make A Complete Unknown, with the pair being particularly close by the time they started shooting the film.
“He would bring his guitar to the set of Dune or the set of Wonka, and we would check in,” Mangold said. “We both happen to be shooting movies in England at the same time, and we just made an effort to stay in touch and stay talking, and texting one another cool things we had found out, or I would send him fresh pages of the script.”
“He’s a deeply thoughtful, deeply passionate, really motivated, focused young man, and I felt like I just had to keep giving him food, things to chew on that might help him over time.”
‘They’re not expecting to be portrayed with any kind of polish’
While much of the attention is on Chalamet’s Dylan, Barbaro’s portrayal of Baez is a particular highlight of this film. The actor beautifully explores the complexity of the artist’s relationship with Dylan, and Barbaro had the opportunity to speak to Baez to inform her work in A Complete Unknown.
“It was something I was very nervous to do, because I just had absolutely placed her on a pedestal,” Barbaro said. “But I felt like it was a very Joan thing to do, to reach out, and she was just really generous to give me her time.”
“We talked about her learning to play the guitar and her learning arrangements and things, and she said she would just play guitar until she fell asleep, and then she’d wake up and grab the guitar and keep playing. And I was like, oh my god I’ve done that. And so it was just nice to sort of relate on some things and get a little bit of insight into the things that maybe weren’t in her memoirs. But she really is very honest about herself. … I think that’s sort of a testament to folk music, and Bob Dylan and all of these people, I think, were just really open about themselves, and they’re not expecting to be portrayed with any kind of polish.”
Additionally, there’s an electric feeling that comes through the screen when we get to see Barbaro and Chalamet sing together as Baez and Dylan, with all the performances in the movie happening live for the filming of the movie.
“It was magical. He’s an incredible actor,” Barbaro said. “I really admired him before I ever met him, and I still do, and so there was just a lot of trust there.”
“I had heard some of his recordings, so I knew his voice was spot on, and by the time we met in a music rehearsal and by the time we were filming, I just so trusted his interpretation of Bob, and I think he trusted me as Joan. We didn’t have to become overly cerebral about what we sort of thought their relationship was, we could just sort of show up as the people and trust the words on the page, and trust Jim, and let the present moment kind of fly.”
‘People feel because they love you, you owe them’
A particularly compelling element of A Complete Unknown is this look at how Dylan managed fame. As we see in the film, as he becomes famous fans have this expectation that they deserve a piece of him as a person, not just another record. It’s something we certainly see celebrities face today.
Norton highlighted that Dylan’s approach to fame is something he’s admired, and something he would talk about with Chalamet while making this film.
“You’re young, you do a few things, and suddenly you’re the voice of your generation and you’re being anointed, and for a person as young as he was to be so fundamentally mistrustful of that, and in many ways to not only recoil from it, but kind of refuse to participate in it. To refuse to unpack meaning, to refuse to acknowledge the phraseology of ‘voice of a generation,’ and to just use the music itself as the vehicle for himself to move forward and explore it, it might be as much the source of my admiration for Dylan as the music itself,” Norton said.
“I think there are very few people, ever, before or since, who have stood firm against the way that fame can make people behave, as he did. To me, he’s the North Star of resistance to the corrosion of those things.”
In a separate interview Mangold highlighted that making art is an “act of control,” but getting fame and having people trying to “grab a piece of you” is something that the famous person has little control over.
“It’s not really about art. It’s about your actual soul or body being a kind of commodity with which people feel, because they love you, you owe them,” Mangold said.
“The act of art making is a one-way street. Someone is saying, here’s something I’ve made with tremendous personal energy and care that I’m giving to you, and you can embrace it. But the fact that you like it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to more of them, besides maybe more music. And that other aspect of them they owe to their loved ones in their real world, they owe to their family or their friends. It’s not what they owe to someone who just likes their music.”
The filmmaker added that he appreciates the way Dylan maintained those boundaries for himself with fame, and highlighted that the artist has also handled his celebrity status with a “playfulness” and “provocativeness,” often providing false narratives to interviewers. But Mangold also identified that it’s psychologically revealing about him.
“The stories he tells are not all that different. He always imagines himself as some kind of Tom Waitsian kind of circus act that’s travelled in the elephant car of a carnival for years, amid the alcoholics and the railroad teams, and the animal cars and the magicians, and the tattooed lady,” Mangold said. “So aside from him playing with people’s expectations, I also think the stories he did tell reveal a kind of yearning in him to be something more interesting than just another kid from a middle-class home in Minnesota.”