A Complete Unknown director James Mangold says Bob Dylan biopic is about the burden of ‘genius’

A Complete Unknown is not James Mangold’s first time around a biopic of a music icon.

In 2005, he released Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, netting the latter an Oscar.

His Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is not a re-tread.

“Of course you don’t want to tell the same story again, and it isn’t,” he told The Nightly.

For Mangold, Walk the Line was a classic Freudian psychological story about the shame Cash carried from his childhood, and A Complete Unknown is something completely different.

“I don’t think Dylan has a burden in that old-school psychological sense but I do think he carries a large burden of a different kind, which is this gift.

“While it’s an asset and a glorious one, it also separates him, and probably has all his life, from people around him, and perhaps comes packaged with a kind of social anxiety or reticence to engage because he’s operating in a slightly different language or vernacular than everyone else.”

A Complete Unknown, is a story about genius.

Timothée Chalamet has earned rave plaudits for his performance as Dylan, even performing all the songs live on set, and is considered one of two front-runners for the Academy Award alongside Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.

It’s a committed, embodied performance, starting from the moment he arrives in New York City with a guitar, a notebook and a few dollars to meet his idol, Woody Guthrie. That evocative opening sequence was one Mangold had visualised immediately, as if was “like a fable or out of a fairy tale or a western”.

I do believe there’s value in making movies that are earnest.

But so much of A Complete Unknown shifts perspectives to the people around him. His girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who was based on Suze Rotolo, whose photo appeared on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album, folk singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), collaborator and sometime-lover Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and even Cash (Boyd Holbrook).

“These are all people who have different responses to the facility and genius of Dylan — to love, to idolise, to want to control, to envy and to resent,” Mangold said.

To each of them, Dylan is someone else, but they all recognise his intrinsic talents, and that he was a generation-defining artist. The times, they were a-changing, and Dylan was critical to that shift.

The film, then, becomes as much as about the movement around Dylan and what he inspired as it is about the man — Mangold drew on this multi-focus approach from Amadeus, made by his old film teacher, Milos Forman.

Amadeus is an interesting work to bring up, because it also belonged to the same genre, even if it’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as Elvis, Rocketman, Love & Mercy, Judy or Walk the Line.

While it’s a genre that can comfortably hold films as divergent as the spectacular Amadeus to the critically-dudded albeit commercially successful Bohemian Rhapsody, Mangold has identified a hurdle music biopics have to jump that others do not.

“There’s such a sensitivity about the tropes of the biopic, but, to me, there seem to be none about the tropes of gangster pictures or westerns of superhero movies,” he argued. “I don’t quite understand.”

“Also, there are tropes, trope isn’t a negative, it’s become a negative, but (what it is) is a dramatic device. It means a kind of metaphor, and it’s come to mean storytelling devices, but how many times have I seen heroes loading their weapons in the room behind a half-closed door as they’re about to spring around.

“Why is the biopic this peculiar area where people are so sensitive to anything that resembles a pre-existing movie? Some of these movements or repetitions in storytelling are joyous.

“Maybe it’s a sense that Hollywood has over-exploited this genre, and that could be the case, but I certainly can think of other genres Hollywood has over-exploited that no one seems to get upset at the repetitions.”

Mangold’s friend, Rian Johnson — the filmmaker behind Brick, The Last Jedi and the two Knives Out movies — has previously said he leant into the tropes of the murder mystery because it’s fun to be there — and why mess with a genre that Agatha Christie made so delightful?

“I feel like we’ve gotten into such an ironic age that anything that resembles earnestness or is a familiar, traditional form is ripe for suspicion, but that means if that were true, then we’d only be able to live in the sardonic, the sarcastic, the tongue-in-cheek and the half-meaning film, and I do believe there’s value in making movies that are earnest.”

A Complete Unknown is an earnest film, and Mangold has faith in a genre that, he said, “is based on a simple reality that film and music are great together, and that it’s an incredible medium for song and music, and intensity and emotion, and movement and colour and light”.

Also, if you think about it, there are already Dylan or Dylan-adjacent movies that are a little off-kilter, such as Todd Haynes’ experimental project I’m Not There and the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis.

So, there’s definitely room for a straighter Dylan biopic.

The audiences, including what must be Dylan fans in addition to the Chalamaniacs, are responding. The film’s US box office is close to recouping A Complete Unknown’s production budget and it’s barely opened in any of the major international markets.

Mangold said he always makes his movies for himself first, but in thinking of the audience for a Dylan biopic, he knew it had to work on at least two wavelengths, which included those who have little or no knowledge about Dylan’s influence and impact. The other was probably the harder one.

“The Dylan fans who are inevitably going to be pleased or displeased based on whether your vision or Timmy’s version of Bob matches not even reality but whatever their collective imagination might be about their hero.”

That’s a serious – and earnest – challenge.

A Complete Unknown is in cinemas on January 23