A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold’s film about Bob Dylan’s early years, is going big with its release date, hitting theaters on the prime, Oscar-candidate date of Dec. 25. The film — which stars Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (closely based on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo), Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Edward Norton as folk legend Pete Seeger — just finished shooting in June, but Mangold was already deep into the editing process as of late July.
“It looks like a movie,” Mangold told Rolling Stone in his first in-depth interview about the film. “I love the creative momentum of just charging toward an audience headlong … It can be just as scary to work slowly as it is to work fast. So I embrace it. The movie is really taking form and teaching us what it wants to be. I think we have enough time to bring that to a landing in a lovely way.” (To hear an extended audio version of our interview, check out our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast — go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)
Mangold told Rolling Stone that the movie — which traces Dylan’s early years in New York and the journey to his legendary gone-electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 — is more of an ensemble piece than a standard biopic. “It’s certainly following Bob, but I’m much more interested in the wake that this person has left on others,” he said. “Elle’s character and Pete Seeger, Edward’s character, and Joan Baez, of course, and many others are more than just passing through in a kind of Hall of Presidents pageant. They’re significant players coming in and out of the movie. They all were instrumental in his journey in the years between ’61 and ’65, but they all also interacted with him in different ways that are prisms and keyholes to different aspects of who Bob might be.”
Chalamet’s performance will show how Dylan evolved over the movie’s five-year span of events, Mangold promised. “He does an incredible job of growing the character up,” he said. “Most Dylan fans don’t focus on the boy in the newsboy cap who’s arriving in town. And Timmy really carries this character from a 19-year-old boy telling tales of working on the carnival into this person that we recognize as an icon. Timmy finds the path to carry us there. It’s going to be impossible for people in trailers or teasers or photos to see, but the way he grows this character is a real act of acting brilliance in my opinion.”
Dylan himself spent several days meeting with Mangold about the movie, and may have signaled approval for Chalamet’s performance of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” in the first trailer by adding it back into his own set list this week.
