Far Out Facts: Everything we know so far about Bob Dylan biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’
This year should be the year that we’re finally treated to a narrative film exploring the life of one of popular culture’s most iconic figures. In December 2024, the Bob Dylan biopic arrives.
A Complete Unknown will star Timothée Chalamet as the man himself, with James Mangold directing. Taking its name from a lyric in Dylan’s most celebrated song, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, the work will chart his rise to prominence and the most definitive period of his career.
While this subject isn’t completely unchartered territory for cinema, it will be the first time it’s been dramatised in this way. Compared to the countless Beatles biopics, pastiches and parodies, Dylan’s life has largely been left alone by filmmakers.
The lack of Dylan biopics already out there in part relates to the veil of mystery in which he shrouds himself. And it’s partly due to how challenging the real-life material is to work with. Bob Dylan is known for constantly reinventing himself, carrying off public personas of various guises, and deliberately obstructing attempts to delve into his personal life.
Nevertheless, Mangold and Chalamet have taken up the mantle of telling his story. So here’s everything we know so far about the film A Complete Unknown.
But is this the first movie made about Dylan?
Although there is no definitive Bob Dylan biopic out there, we have seen him on the big screen a fair few times before.
Real-life Bob starred in two acclaimed documentaries by DA Pennebaker, following his period of transition from acoustic folk to electric folk-rock during two live tours in 1965 and 1966. Don’t Look Back was released in 1967, and its sequel, Eat the Document, followed in 1972.
Then there are Martin Scorsese’s two more recent documentary efforts, which were made with the active participation of the artist himself. Dylan was interviewed for No Direction Home, which also draws on footage from Pennebaker’s films, while Rolling Thunder Revue uses footage from his 1975-76 tour. The latter film is currently available to watch on Netflix.
Dylan himself wrote and directed the experimental 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, based on the filming he did during his 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
The only previous fictionalised dramatisation of Dylan’s life of any repute was Todd Haynes’ 2007 film I’m Not There. However, with its non-linear, experimental narrative involving six different actors each playing completely different versions of Dylan (effectively different characters), it can hardly be considered a biopic.
And a fictional Dylan made a brief cameo appearance at the end of the Coen Brothers’ 2013 movie Inside Llewyn Davis. The film is based on the life of his Greenwich Village folk scene contemporary Dave van Ronk.
Who else is in the cast of A Complete Unknown?
In addition to Chalamet in the lead role, A Complete Unknown will star Top Gun: Maverick’s Monica Barbaro as Dylan’s fellow folk singer and love interest Joan Baez. The Great actor Elle Fanning will feature as his first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo (under the pseudonym Sylvie Russo), and seasoned Walking Dead star Dan Fogler will play Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman.
There’ll be appearances from Scoot McNairy, Edward Norton and Michael Chernus, too. Asfabled folk singers Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk, respectively. As well as Narcos actor Boyd Holbrook, who’ll cameo as Johnny Cash, and Will Harrison from musical miniseries Daisy Jones & the Six, who makes his feature film debut as Dylan’s roadie Bob Neuwirth. And former child star Charlie Tahan seems well-cast as a dead ringer for Al Kooper, the man who added the legendary out-of-time Hammond organ part to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.
So, what does Chalamet look like as Bob Dylan?
The first pictures of Chalamet’s physical appearance as Dylan were released in March. They showed the actor wearing garb Dylan would have donned around the time his self-titled debut album was released in 1962.
There’s the unbuttoned flat cap he wears on the album’s cover, a grey jacket, nubuck leather boots, and matching brown scarf, knapsack and fingerless gloves. In the initial teaser trailer for the movie, released on July 24th, Chalamet’s Dylan is seen carrying his guitar case past Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street, one of New York’s most hallowed music venues at the heart of Greenwich Village’s folk scene in the early 1960s.
We also know that Chalamet researched researched Dylan obsessively throughout the pandemic and has been perfecting the singer’s accent and intonation with a voice coach. From what we see in the teaser, he’s got it pretty spot on, from the affected gait of the mop-haired Dylan’s 1965-66 surrealist electric blues period, to his overblinking concentration during a performance of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.
During that performance, a close-up of Chalamet’s face under the limelight reveals the extensive use of prosthetics to make the actor look more the person he’s playing, including the accentuation of his Roman nose. This particular addition might prove controversial given Dylan’s Jewish descent, as it did when similar prosthetics were applied to Bradley Cooper’s for his part as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.
What does the trailer tell us, then?
The teaser might come in at under two minutes, but its sweeping overview of the film appears like a checklist of the characters and places that populated Dylan’s first five years in New York. Pete Seeger, Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez all feature prominently, as does the Hotel Chelsea, where the artist lived for two years and wrote some of his greatest works.
It begins with Pete Seeger introducing a Greenwich folk cafe audience to the young Dylan as “a glimpse of the future” and ending with one of Seeger’s children telling him he’d made a “good start” to a song he was writing. Dylan the musical and literary visionary is clearly going to be a focus of the movie.
Fans will be pleased that ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ has been used as the centrepiece of the trailer, in lieu of more cliched choices like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or the song from which the picture takes its title. This decision implies that the filmmakers are serious about Dylan’s music, and aren’t simply interested in surface-level soap opera.
We briefly see Dylan riding a motorbike with Rotolo (whose name has been changed to “Sylvie Russo” in the movie for legal reasons) on the back, prefiguring his infamous motorcycle accident in 1966. And the knowing looks and kisses shared between the musician and his first two real muses indicates that the love triangle between Rotolo, Dylan and Baez is going to be a key aspect of the drama within the film’s narrative.
But which era does the film cover?
From the list of characters, the trailer and the early still photos which have been released, as well as studio press releases so far, we know that the film will chart Dylan’s life and career roughly from 1961 to 1965.
The narrative will likely begin with Robert Zimmerman (Dylan’s real name) arriving in New York as a teenager in 1961, in search of his hero Woody Guthrie. And it could climax with Dylan turning to electric folk-blues music, abandoning the acoustic sound of his protest songs, in 1965.
There hasn’t yet been confirmation that versions of artist Andy Warhol or his superstar and romantic interest for Dylan Edie Sedgwick will appear in the movie. This suggests that it could end in mid-1965, with the shocking moment of Dylan and his band “plugging in” at the Newport Folk Festival, and just before his period of heavy drug-taking and surrealist lyricism.
Although the brief glimpses of late-’65/early ’66 Dylan we get in the teaser trailer hint that it might go beyond that, ending with his mysterious motorcycle crash on July 29th 1966. This cut-off point in his story has already been used by Scorsese for the ending of No Direction Home.
The film’s direct source material, Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, suggests as much. Since it too climaxes in tension between Dylan and folk purist Pete Seeger boiling over at Newport in July 1965.
And who is James Mangold?
A Complete Unknown’s director James Mangold is best-known for directing dazzling, action-packed but emotionally lightweight pictures, such as Ford v Ferrari, X-Men’s The Wolverine and Logan, and the latest instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise.
However, earlier in his career, he made his name directing successful films in a variety of genres, from the neo-noir Cop Land and the psychological thriller Girl, Interrupted, to the mystery film Identity and the western 3:10 to Yuma.
Perhaps more importantly, he did a pretty good job with Walk the Line, the biopic of country singer Johnny Cash, who was Dylan’s contemporary and friend. Cash even appears as a minor character in A Complete Unknown.
It’s to be hoped that Mangold draws on his experience to do the complex and nuanced subject matter of Dylan’s early career transformation justice.
Finally, has Dylan himself signed off on the film?
The answer to this question is, surprisingly, an emphatic yes. James Mangold told the Happy Sad Confused podcast last year that he’d spent a lot of time talking with Dylan personally, one-on-one.
Not only has Dylan approved the film. Mangold has “a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me.” The artist is very much involved in this telling of his story, then. Perhaps he feels that now’s perfect time to tell it on the silver screen.
Or Mangold managed to convince him when he explained that the film isn’t actually a Bob Dylan biopic. The director says this was a key factor in the man himself giving the project the green light. Well, as long as you’ve convinced him, James. Let’s see what type of non-biopic it turns out to be.
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