Bob Dylan is one of music’s most storied figures – often labelled Rock’s Poet Laureate, he’s inspired entire libraries of analysis and historiography. The silver screen has long adored the American artist, whether that’s utilising his music to soundtrack key moments, employing Dylan in a starring role, or the range of biopics – some more traditional than others – which chart different aspects of his life.

A Complete Unknown is certainly one of the most striking, absorbing, and emotionally impactful re-tellings of Bob Dylan’s rise that we’ve seen. Directed by James Mangold and starring Timothee Chalomet in the central role, it moves from a meeting with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in a hospital world through the tumult of the early to mid 60s, before exiting at the infamous Dylan-goes-electric performance at Newport ’65.

A high-octane narrative with a wonderful soundtrack – ably re-recorded by the cast themselves – it boasts some absorbing performances (Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger) while refusing to fully brush away Dylan’s enigmatic status.

CLASH spoke to director James Mangold over Zoom about the film, and Dylan’s own connection to the release.

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You signed on to the project within minutes of reading the initial script – what was it about the script that grabbed you? 

The meeting of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. In many ways the existing script from when I came on jumped from that meeting all the way to 1964, so when I came in I really developed what came before, and immediately after. I wanted to chronicle Bob’s transformation from this kind of unknown – as it were – this enigmatic figure arriving with a guitar case, from God know’s where, in New York with a brand new name. Taking him from there, to that moment in 1965. But it wasn’t just the script, it was also Elijah Wald’s book. And also the opportunity to tell a story about Bob Dylan, with Bob Dylan’s co-operation – that’s the only way to do it, because you want to unlock the treasure box of music that he controls.

You mention the book – Elijah Wald has seen the film, and loves it. In an interview, he said it tells “an emotional truth” – is that something you wanted to get across in the film from the outset?

That’s what movies do best. I mean, first of all, no one agrees how everything happened. That’s your first problem. If I interview every single person from the illustrious cast of people in this movie then they all have their own version of how things went down. So you never get the truth, just many conflicting versions. Making a biographical film is like writing a biography – it’s about trying to parse out what happened. An unlike a biography who can cite various people, I can’t do different versions of how a song arrived… I have to pick what is most likely or most possible and go with it. I can’t do different options.

“Emotional truth” is what a movie is best at delivering. It’s more than emotion, it gives you the vibe of the moment, it puts you in the time, the place, it reminds you that sometimes people make history but they’re not aware they’re making history when it happens. Retro-actively, we put so much framing of importance on those moments, and we think all the participants knew how influential and powerful what was happening at the moment around them was. But what was really clear to me, with the research materials but also through talking to Dylan himself quite a bit was that none of them aware… and Bob still doesn’t even know why he decided to do what he did in Newport ’65. It occurred to me what while we view it as this cultural landmark event, for the participants of the event it was more like a holiday family dinner gone awry – the Prodigal Son, the dad, the mother, the sisters all end up in a terrible row that’s been brewing for years based upon tensions that’s been brewing for years. In this case, the fact that the whole family – in this case, the folk world – had become dependant on Bob as a kind of centre tent pole holding up their entire world. They were terrified of the idea of him leaving for fear that their whole tent could collapse. That the incredible ascendance of folk music in the mid 60s was really largely due to Dylan’s influence. You have that really unique energy at play at the same time, and so many relationships that started out purely through admiration and affection, and because of the unique power of his talent became quickly transactional in nature. Or at least in part.

Pete Seeger’s characterisation is wonderful – it’s very sympathetic, but also flawed.

Well, Pete was an idealist, a gentle soul. He was an evangelist for the type of music he loved most, and as an evangelist he had an agenda, and anyone with an agenda is unavoidably sometimes having to push that over how they might otherwise handle the situation. 

I mean, I love Pete Seeger. I don’t see that they are ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys’ in this movie I try to never make movies that way – I can see them as protagonists and antagonists, which in Greek Aristotelian logic puts two people in pursuance of oppositional or competing goals. It doesn’t mean either one is bad or good, it just means they aren’t in complete alignment. What I thought was so interesting was where Dylan starts – he’s almost in alignment with Pete, but you already see the fracture there. In the first scene, Dylan can’t stop talking about how much he admires Little Richard and Johnny Cash – the point being that Dylan admires pop music, and music made by ‘pop stars’ as much as he admires folk music. There’s no tribalism or dogma for Dylan, and that cleave between the two of them is what obviously becomes quite bigger later in the picture.

Johnny Cash plays a key role both in Dylan’s actual life, and in the film. There’s a few other people you could have included – meetings with the Beatles, for example – but what does Johnny Cash supply to the narrative in the film?

The thing about the Beatles was, God knows how I’d ever have gotten the rights to the music within our budget! And the reality is that the Beatles was just a few meetings, but Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan were long-time deeply felt correspondents between two peers. The letters you hear in the movie are the actual letters they wrote to one another. 

I also thought Cash was particularly useful because he was someone who was both embraced by the folk world, but also played in a band, and didn’t play by the roles, and didn’t accept their dogma, and was a gigantic star. They obviously gave Cash the room within the folk world to be himself, a sense of space that they didn’t want to give Bob. Because of course Bob was the centre post holding up the tent of folk music, and Johnny Cash was not. He was a guest star from the world of the South. The pressure on Bob wasn’t entirely fair, if you look at it objectively. The words in the movie – with Cash saying to him, track mud on someone’s carpet – that’s lifted directly from Johnny’s letters to Bob, in terms of encouraging this young man to trust his instincts and not worry about who he offends.

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The scenes in Greenwich Village are wonderfully atmospheric – do you stay hard and fast to history, or do you allow yourself a certain amount of fantasy?

Well, when we had a scene in 1961 we didn’t allow cars from 1964 to be shown. Within the confines of our limited budget we did everything we could to be factual in every detail down to the most granular. The way shops and clubs looked, the way streets looked, the way our costume and design departments were steeped in research of the different years. And there’s a huge amount of change that occurs, particularly between ’64 and ’65 – the world really changes in ’65.

Dylan said to me that he believed the 60s didn’t really exist. That the first part of the 60s was an extension of the 60s, and the second part of the 60s was the prologue to the 70s. The late 60s was Woodstock, pop music, Beatles, Stones, the rock ‘n’ roll generation, Vietnam, assassinations. The first part of the 60s was this kind of beatnik, poetry, Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie… an extension, in a sense, of the 50s. The real decade change occurred mid 60s, right about when Bob goes electric.

Well, I’m not going to deny the logic of Bob Dylan! One of the great things about the film is the pacing – it sweeps you up in the cultural flux of Dylan’s life, but also America itself.

Well, I felt strongly that Bob was such a character, and so many of the people are characters, and the music itself is so stylistically strong, that the movie… we have an expression in movie-making, we say ‘putting a hat on a hat’. Don’t put funny music on a funny moment – it’s too much, it’ll destroy it. I felt like I wanted the film-making to be austere enough and observational enough that the characters really blossomed. I wasn’t trying to make myself the star through some mimicry of a Pennebaker movie, I just wanted to sit back and watch as this emergent moment happened – which in history, in music, is so important. 

But we’re also watching the interactions between these characters who all deeply loved each other, had so many feelings for each other – jealousy, resentment, adoration, loyalty, worship… I wanted to observe all these nuances of connection between Dylan and the world around him.

If we look at your own work, you’ve worked on biopics before, but also sci-fi, thrillers… a huge range of genres! Would you really approach a Dylan film in the same fashion you approach a science fiction epic?

The simple answer is they’re all the same. There’s people who write about movies, like, to try and divide them… but I think one place I really have tremendous kinship with Bob is that I’m not such a fan of the way we put records in different bins in the record store, and nor am I such a fan of the way we put movies in such different bins in our movie list and analysis. Meaning, if I make a science fiction film or a superhero film or a true-life movie, I still have to build a world, and I have to teach you how that world operates. But even New York in the 60s is – at this point – a make-believe world, it doesn’t exist anymore. I have to recreate it, and I have to allow the audience to understand how people functioned in that time, how songs were written in that time, without four track machines and digital recorders. That moment is its own history lesson, and we have to show how people communicated and connected with one another was different at that moment – certainly less about clicking and texting and more about physically being there.

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A Complete Unknown is out at cinemas now.