Bob Dylan really wanted me to know how lonely it is being a solo performer, says ‘A Complete Unknown’ biopic director

TO borrow the title of a Bob Dylan song, it was a case of “one more cup of coffee” for the film director. (Or perhaps not, as you’ll see.)

When James Mangold got stuck into making his biopic A Complete Unknown, focusing on Dylan’s transition from folkie to rock star, there was one person he needed to talk to above all others.

The notoriously elusive singer himself.

To his great joy and relief, his wish was granted in 2020 during the Covid lockdowns — with strict social distancing rules applied, of course.

The first of several meetings between filmmaker and music legend was arranged in Santa Monica, a few miles along America’s West Coast from Dylan’s home in Malibu.

“We were in a shut-down coffee shop — just me and him,” recalls Mangold.

As a lifelong Dylan devotee, I find myself asking, “How did Bob take his coffee?” and instantly regretting it.

A commanding yet warm presence, Mangold sees the funny side, laughing before replying: “I don’t know. I’m not even sure he had one.”

Then he adds in a more serious vein: “Bob was very kind and very open. It was joyous and he was charming.

“I’m sure he was trying to feel me out in terms of whether I had some sort of agenda, which in a sense I did not — other than a pure one which was to explore the story truthfully.”

‘Getting the vibe right’

That story, portrayed with such conviction by Timothee Chalamet as Dylan and a fine ensemble cast, begins in 1961 when the singer leaves his Midwest home and pitches up in New York City with barely a cent to his name.

It shows him gatecrashing the folk scene, becoming its charismatic focal point before leaving it all behind by “going electric” at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, causing much outrage.

I suggest to Mangold that Dylan’s life echoes a line from his Seventies song Tangled Up In Blue, that he “keeps on keeping on like a bird that flew”.

The director picks up the theme: “He runs, he builds a new world but, the second he gets found out, he begins to choke and runs again.

“Timothee has his way of putting it: ‘Dylan shines his light here but, if we all look at it, he wants to shine it somewhere else.’”

For Mangold, meeting Dylan, now 83, was “not just about getting facts right but, more importantly, getting the feeling and the vibe right”.

Though he’s also known these days for blockbusters such as Logan and Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, Mangold has form when it comes to biopics.

His 2005 film Walk The Line, recounting Johnny Cash’s tempestuous, drug-fuelled life in the Fifties and Sixties, was an unqualified triumph.

When it came to his encounters with Dylan, that big Cash-shaped plus on his CV helped a lot.

There’s a great deal of honour and brotherhood in Dylan and I think we’ve kept that [in A Complete Unknown].

James Mangold

During the promotional whirl around A Complete Unknown in London, Mangold tells me: “We talked about everything. First of all, Bob’s a fan of my second movie Cop Land and remembered it vividly.

“He liked Walk The Line very much and, of course, liked Johnny Cash very much. The fact Cash had chosen to trust me gave him some measure of confidence.”

This comment reminds Mangold of his first dealings with Dylan more than 20 years ago.

“When we made Walk The Line, we had very little money, but Johnny Cash [before his death in 2003] kindly agreed a minuscule price per song we wanted to use.

“Of course, we had him singing It Ain’t Me Babe in the script, so we needed Dylan’s clearance.

“The studio was like, ‘You can’t afford this song’, but when we reached out, Bob’s response was, ‘I’ll take whatever Johnny’s getting’.

“At that point, all the other music we needed for Walk The Line became a waterfall of economy because no one dared charge more than Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.

“There’s a great deal of honour and brotherhood in Dylan and I think we’ve kept that [in A Complete Unknown].”

When, in 2019, Mangold was given screenwriter Jay Cocks’s script — based on Elijah Wald’s meticulously researched book, Dylan Goes Electric: Seeger, Dylan, Newport, And The Night That Split The Sixties — he threw himself into the project.

‘Didn’t seem invasive’

He remoulded the story to some extent, diving deeper into Bob’s key relationships with, among others, first serious girlfriend Suze Rotolo and fellow folk luminaries Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

Mangold was pushing at an open door because Dylan and his camp, led by manager Jeff Rosen, had already optioned Wald’s book

“Dylan responded to it because it was such a good story to cover,” he says. “And his management team were predisposed to co-operating.

“Bob might have been most attracted to it because he saw it as essentially a story about the music, so it didn’t seem invasive.

“After spending time with him, I believe it’s a part of his life that still doesn’t completely make sense to him.

“You’re talking about someone trying to remember why they did something when they were 19, 20, 21, 22. Who among us can explain everything we did, and why, when we were that age?”

Of his discussions with Dylan, Mangold says: “We talked about the script and he was very encouraging. That first meeting was called because he had read it and had responded positively.

“So it wasn’t some big corrective exercise — it was much more about getting the little things right.” At Dylan’s insistence, the name

of the late Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend in the early Sixties, was changed to Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) to protect her privacy.

They were famously photographed by Don Hunstein for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 on a snowy day outside the 4th Street apartment they shared in New York City.

Later on in Mangold’s dealings with Dylan, the singer even made notes in the margins of the script.

“They were all really creative notes,” he says. “They were much less about ‘you got me wrong’, much more, ‘this person called me Bobby’ or ‘that person called me Bob’.

“In one scene between Bob and Sylvie, he seemed to really get into the fight they were having and was adding lines to the margins. I actually felt him joining myself and Jay Cocks in the creative process.”

Mangold decides that “the biggest thing” he got out of talking to Dylan was “his feelings”.

‘This exalted position’

He says: “Something he really wanted me to understand was the loneliness of being a solo performer and this was married to the fact that he wanted to be in a band since he was a teen.”

“It was really moving hearing him speak about it.”

If you watch early footage of Dylan, and Chalamet’s mesmerising likeness, you’ll see he cuts a solitary, slightly awkward, albeit compelling figure, with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica for company.

Bear in mind that when Bob attended Hibbing High School in the late Fifties, his idols were rock ’n’ rollers Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, who were all backed by bands.

Mangold says: “It’s hard to understand retrospectively that when he got to this exalted position as a solo artist, alone with a guitar, that it may not have been what he wanted for himself.

“Bob’s facility in that arena was unparalleled but his dream of having the camaraderie and the fun of playing in a band never left him.”

Mangold concludes: “The reason it was so important for Bob to relate all this to me was his hope that, in the movie, you’d understand he wasn’t acting out against the folk scene but more fulfilling a wish he’d had since he was 13.

“He didn’t understand why it was so traumatic for him to move into some new place, particularly one that was less lonely, which gave him the simple pleasures of comrades.”

In A Complete Unknown, which opens in UK cinemas today, the big finale centres on Dylan’s fateful 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival.

He has assembled an ace band including blues guitarist Mike Bloom-field and organ player Al Kooper to unleash unvarnished, plugged-in renditions of Maggie’s Farm, Phantom Engineer (later revised to It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry) and a song with lyrics that yielded the biopic’s title, Like A Rolling Stone.

Legend has it that folk purist Pete Seeger, played so expertly by Edward Norton, yelled: “If I had an axe, I’d chop the microphone cable right now.”

In the movie, which neatly blurs what actually happened with mythology, you see Norton eyeing up a row of axes. To Dylan fans, it’s a laugh-out-loud moment.

You also hear one incensed member of the audience shout, “Judas!” even though, in reality, that happened a year later in England, at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall.

In the movie, the songs became Dylan’s monologues. His way of telling us how he feels and who he is.

James Mangold

Mangold says: “Bob got into this position where the audience was really angry, but none of us can understand what that would have felt like for him. It was on a scale that I’ve certainly never felt.

“You can’t answer them because you only put more kerosene on the fire. You just have to absorb it.

“That was really hard for him because his relationship with the fans was already challenging. Even when it was just love.”

One of the most compelling aspects of A Complete Unknown is the way it puts Dylan’s songs front and centre.

You see Chalamet tackle a blizzard of compositions, all written between 1961 and 1965 . . .  

Protest anthems like Blowin’ In The Wind, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall and The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Reflections on love and loss in the shape of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright and Girl From The North Country.

Exercises in dazzling, surreal wordplay such as Mr Tambourine Man, Highway 61 Revisited and Like A Rolling Stone.

Mangold says: “When I was writing, along with Jay, one of the collaborators WAS Bob, in the sense that his music is such a dominating and poetic thing.

‘Bob’s deeply artistic’

“The arranging of songs along the timeline of what was happening in the world and what was happening in his life made them suddenly open up for me in different ways.”

This brings us to the film title, A Complete Unknown, which suggests what many feel — that Dylan is a man of mystery.

But Mangold is not convinced. “He is so prolific and his writing so personal and deeply artistic that I question this idea of him being enigmatic or unknowable or mysterious,” he affirms.

“While I understand it, and that he’s even cultivated some of it, it’s also a little odd to describe him like this.

“He’s released 55 records! I don’t understand why a man who has written 600 songs about love, life, identity — with philosophies that are so easy to read out — is required to explain further.

“In the movie, the songs became Dylan’s monologues. His way of telling us how he feels and who he is.”

At times, he almost certainly did feel “like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone”.