Something is happening here and, given the hoopla over “A Complete Unknown,” probably even Mr. Jones has an idea what it is: Bob Dylan mania. Thanks to James Mangold’s new film, America is currently experiencing a spike of collective fascination with Dylan that probably hasn’t peaked quite this high since 1965, when the events of the biopic wrap up.
Thankfully, “A Complete Unknown” has turned out to be a thoughtful treatment as well as a crowd-pleasing one that, against most odds, seems to be equally bowling over deeply Dylan-informed boomers and younger audiences that might have Timothée Chalamet as their first point of entry into this world. (The film has accrued a 96% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and when Cinemascore pollsters asked “How does it feel,” the response was a solid A grade.) As a filmmaker, Mangold (“Walk the Line,” “Logan”) doesn’t try to solve the mysteries of Dylan for moviegoers. But it appears he’s given them something they like even better than easy psychological tropes: electricity.
Variety talked with Mangold about the challenges in structuring the screenplay (which he took over from initial writer Jay Cocks); what happened when he spent 18 hours personally talking with Dylan; his direction of award-contending performances from Chalamet, Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro; and, surprisingly, how Pete Seeger was as much of a youthful hero to him as Dylan.
For some of us who didn’t think there could ever be a convincing, realistic portrayal of Dylan on screen, and one that works for people as a movie, there’s a feeling that you’ve pulled off the impossible.
Well, I think some people were so convinced it’s not possible, they’re looking at the movie and even now remain convinced it’s not possible. Even if it might be possible, they just can’t open their eyes. Sometimes people say they want more of Dylan’s secrets — but then, also, say they don’t want a standard biopic. It’s like, pick (criticism) A or B! But ultimately, it’s really gratifying, the reactions that so many people are having.
It was puzzling, how to make a movie about this particular fellow and that world. And my feeling was to just refuse to acknowledge this kind of enigma stuff. Like, just make the movie, let the events happen and let the audience absorb what they want from it. There’s an interesting level to me where it’s like: How much of an enigma can a man be who’s released 55 records? How much more do you want? He has given us more personal output than almost any artist in history. There’s so much personal poetry that we’ve been exposed to that it’s hard to understand what more he’s supposed to give us that will somehow close the circle for someone.
There definitely are fans who don’t want him overexplained, and were afraid that, if anything, you were going to spend the movie trying to explain or justify what makes Dylan tick.
It’s something I’ve grown allergic to. There’s a kind of standard structure in movies we’ve seen a lot of times, which is: Hero’s carrying a secret; hero struggles to keep the secret down; hero fares badly because he’s hiding something. Come therapy with Judd Hirsch, Tim Hutton reveals the secret, or Matt Damon reveals the secret. “Citizen Kane” reveals the secret, and we now understand! That’s a very sensible meeting of Freudian psychology and dramatic structure. But I also think it’s a little bit too easy, or it’s gotten too easy. And I certainly didn’t feel like this particular character, who I got to also spend time with, would lend himself to that kind of a personal revelation.
As you mention, you did get Dylan to consult on the script. And when people read about that, or saw that his manager is an executive producer, there was a bit of an assumption on some people’s part: “Well, this is gonna be a hagiography.” If there’s anything most people who’ve seen it now would agree upon, it’s that it does not play out that way.
Well, when I came on, I definitely felt like Jay Cocks, who preceded me as a writer, had his hands tied a little bit. He had written some beautiful stuff that I made sure made it into the film. because it was just exquisite work. But there was a level where the script was skipping the early years. It kind of started with Woody (Guthrie, whom Dylan first sought out in 1961) and then went all the way to 1964 almost immediately. I really felt that there was something to seeing the stages of Bob transitioning, but also the relationships, romantic, sexual and otherwise, with the women in the movie. And that was what that trip-wired Bob’s management team feeling nervous about what I was doing when I came on board to the material.
And COVID hit, and then I got a call from (manager) Jeff Rosen saying COVID had canceled Bob’s tour. Given he didn’t have anything to do at the moment, (Dylan) said, “Let me read this script that’s got you guys worried.” And then he read it, and he liked it, and that changed everything. That then instigated the series of meetings with myself and Bob, and Bob read the movie you saw. I didn’t think he had an issue with how he was being depicted, because I think that he saw it as essentially: I didn’t have an agenda, and I wasn’t picking a side. From what I sense being with him, that’s the most important thing — that there’s a neutrality that lets everyone figure out what they think from the circumstances that happened.
I have to wonder what Dylan is thinking when he’s reading the script and — assuming this was in it at the time — it gets to what is probably ithe biggest laugh line in the movie, which is Joan Baez saying, “You know, you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”
Yeah, yeah. I wrote that. But I had many points like that where I thought he was gonna flag things. I wrote this thing where he goes, “You know, people ask where the songs come from, but they don’t really want to know where the songs come from. They want to know why the songs didn’t come to them.” I was sure that was something he was gonna put a big X through, and he didn’t.
I have a lot of empathy for him, to (A) have that kind of work channeling through you at that age, and (B) have so many people wanting shit from you so quickly. And I’m not sure his comportment of himself was designed to make himself into some kind of prophet. I think he kind of took advantage and played the way that the music was playing… I don’t mean the literal music; I mean the way the kind of public relations music was playing.
My take on his being a fabulous and telling stories of the carnival and traveling the Dakotas by rail: I took it as just a young man’s wish, that instead of being a middle-class kid and son of a hardware store owner, that he had a sexier story. And that he mentally told himself that story enough that part of how he made the work was believing that story and almost playing a role in that space. That all made a lot of sense to me, seeing him more as a dreamer than someone who was trying to fuck with everyone. Being a director of actors may have been an added benefit (in viewing it that way).
Also, my own observation was just that he’s a private person. That he had the peculiar contradictions of his own personality; that he had a talent that put him in the spotlight; and he loved to use that talent and to share his music. But the other aspects of being in the spotlight may not have been something that he was genetically or behaviorally predisposed to handle in a kind of standard, professional way, and especially at that young age.
You’ve described how you had an initial meeting with Dylan, and he asked you what the movie was about, and in being asked that, you had kind of a eureka moment. You told him that you saw it as being about a guy who’s sort of suffocating in one environment moving on to the next, starting with his leaving Minnesota at the start.
It starts with suffocating and then running, and rebirthing or building anew. And any casual observer of Bob Dylan’s life can see that that has been something that’s happened more than once, not even in just the period that I chose to depict in this film. But that’s very much the reason, coming from that talk with Bob, that the movie opens with him at the station, hitchhiking into New York, and ends with him on the back of a motorcycle, riding away. The arrival at the opening is a departure from the world he left, and the departure at the end is an arrival to a new world and, in a way, a new period of his life. That to me was really clear, that cyclical, almost musical-ballad-like pattern in his life.
So you felt like you understood that bookending for yourself when you were talking with Dylan. But what was the initial draw for working on the project, before you totally figured what it was really about for you?
There’s a very obvious thing where you’re just getting a chance to tell a story about someone. And if it creates so much anxiety for people that you’re telling a story about this person, you must be onto something, because there’s some kind of incendiary quality to the character that is value-added already. Then to add to that, the story itself, whether it was about Bob or not, is about things I’m very interested in, like tribalism in the arts or in philosophy. It’s about how people get so locked in to a dedication to, in this case, what folk music is or isn’t that it becomes an act of disloyalty to play with a band. It’s also about limitations that feel arbitrary, or that kind of theology, if you will, that is imposed on an artist that might cause an artist that has contrarian impulses or broader ambitions to act out against it.
My way of making a movie, both as a writer and as a director, is to kind of really focus on the deeply personal — the local, if you will — and to really not get distracted at all by the large themes, like changing music and realigning the dynamic and cultural shifts. None of that is what was driving those characters, in my opinion — or at least it couldn’t be in a dramatization. I see Newport ’65 more as a kind of Thanksgiving dinner gone amuck, with family issues that have been brewing for several years getting brought to a head. It happens at Thanksgiving because everyone’s assembled and there’s one dinner, and it puts a lot of pressure on everyone to get along and comport, and those few boundaries and behavioral expectations automatically will produce someone who can’t. And then things blow up.
I felt that Bob’s natural growth as a musician was utterly sensible. I mean, as he explained to me, and as all the texts and references I could find validated, he never was only a folk singer, or thinking of himself with the dogma of what is and isn’t a folk song, ever. He had tremendous success in the arena of folk — artistic success; I don’t just mean financial or popular — but that still doesn’t mean it was the form that he wanted to work in until he died. The form wasn’t the point for him; it was just the canvas. And at the second he wanted to paint on a different canvas, which is of course his option, that was suddenly challenging for others who were more dogmatic about the way they thought about what their mission was. And he had a different mission from the very beginning. It’s what I tried, in a very mundane way, to touch upon in this early scene with Pete and Bob in a car where they’re listening to Little Richard on the radio, coming from entirely different places. Bob’s just patiently listening and really offers not much of an argument besides saying that sometimes drums and a bass sound good. But they’re not in the same place.
There’s wonderful nuance to the way Pete Seeger is treated in this film. It goes beyond the basic expectation that you are too intelligent of a filmmaker to make him the villain of the piece.
No, of course not. He’s filled with love. You could say he’s an antagonist by the end, or one of them, but the word antagonist doesn’t mean bad guy. It just means someone with goals that are in conflict with the protagonist. You know, I don’t let people on my sets — no matter what kind of movie I’m making, even if I’m making a Marvel movie — talk about bad guys and good guys. You know, Mads Mikkelsen [who appeared in Mangold’s previous film, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”] doesn’t believe he’s playing a villain. He believes he’s playing a guy who wakes up and is trying to make the world better every day. That’s anyone’s actions. Darth Vader thought the same thing, that he’s doing the right thing. They might have very misguided and psychologically twisted — in those cases — reasons for doing those things, but they believe they’re doing good.
And on a much more muted scale, of course, Pete Seeger has been a powerful voice for positive things in our world, whether it’s cleaning up the Hudson or fighting for civil rights or against war or for the poor and disenfranchised. This has been his life, even more so maybe than music. The mission was bigger than the music for Pete. And for Bob, it’s music. It’s about the song, and the mission is… Well, I can only make my observations. The mission is less important. The song is an offering, and people can decide what mission they want for themselves. That’s really my perception of things.
But, you know, I grew up really inspired by Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger sang in my mother’s camps when she was in the Catskills in her youth. I listened to Pete Seeger records as much as I listened to Bob Dylan records when I was a teenager. And I played banjo, inspired by, as a combo, Pete and Steve Martin, of course, who are both high school heroes. But I have no problem feeling like the movie doesn’t make a judgment about any of these people. They’re all wonderful, in my opinion, in their own unique ways.
