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So Bob Dylan looks you in the eye and says, “I never intended to become a folk singer.”
What’s that, again?
James Mangold, director, co-writer and co-producer of “A Complete Unknown,” had several lengthy meetings with the musical icon as he worked on the script for the film about him. Mangold hoped to confirm some things (yes, “Masters of War” was written in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis), but mostly to understand the Hall of Fame songwriter in a deeper way than standard research could yield. But sitting down with the Man Himself was a bit daunting, not knowing what Dylan’s reaction to his draft would be.
‘I think she fell in love with the words themselves and how he was saying things she was trying to find the words for,’ the ‘A Complete Unknown’ actor says of the folk singers’ doomed relationship.
However, says the director, “I had a great time. It wasn’t some kind of meeting at Yalta. He was really happy to talk about this time. And the questions I was asking were less agenda-driven than a biographer out to get that ultimate quote; I was just there to understand. So, these became extended conversations about this period in his life, which I think he had enough distance from to be really honest about.”
That period in the film homes in on the four years between Dylan’s arrival in New York and his epic 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance.
The songwriter wasn’t precious about his own work; for the scene in which the screen Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) debuts “Masters of War” in a folk club, “He opened to that page [of the script] and said, ‘You don’t need these verses.’ And he just put Xs through them.”
In adapting Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties,” Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks declined what the director calls the “cradle-to-grave biopic” approach. Mangold believes Dylan himself wanted to better understand that period in his life, especially the anger caused by him playing with a rock band at the Newport brouhaha. That tight focus left space for lived-in moments.
Mangold says movies can “give you a palpable feeling of a moment between humans. I really wanted to watch their interactions, rivalries, love, fears and the music happening, all in a way that you [feel] they didn’t know history was being made. They didn’t know the cultural impact that the songs would have. I wanted the audience to feel that, the innocence.
“Some people might react if I talk about innocence with a character as hyper-intelligent as Dylan. Discussions about him revolve around an idea of him as a manipulator or enigma. I believe that’s half right. But I think a lot of that is what we’ve decided retroactively. I think those skills — of image creation, identity creation, art creation — were acquired in the period we’re watching, as opposed to he just arrived with them.”
That lends dimension to the film’s title — beyond being from Dylan’s iconic song, “Like a Rolling Stone” (“How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone”), itself a key tick in the timeline of Dylan going electric — beyond signifying a new kid in town, breaking into the business. Mangold situates 19-year-old Minnesotan Robert Zimmerman’s reinvention on his arrival in New York in 1961 at one of the film’s poles. His anonymity granted him the freedom to remake himself into whomever he wished us to believe he was.
If “A Complete Unknown” “were a fiction film,” says Mangold, “it would be a very sensible story about a stranger coming into town, creating a new name, meeting the ailing king and his first lieutenant, entering their world as a nobody and then revealing a level of talent by which he suddenly lifts the entire community to heights they had never known, only to move on again and leave them in his wake. That, to me, is such a beautiful fairy tale about self-invention.
“I think of Dylan’s journey in life, which has been a series of reinventions, explosions of success, then wearying of that and reinvention again. So it seemed really joyous to focus on one movement of his life that way.”
But what drove Dylan to that other pole, to meld folk with upstart rock to the extreme chagrin of its gatekeepers? Clues might be found in that comment about never intending to become a folk singer, evoking that classic version of the early Bob Dylan, like when he came back out at the festival without his rock band, with just his acoustic guitar, and was applauded at Newport.
“ ‘If I could have arrived in New York and gotten a band, that would’ve been awesome,’ ” says Mangold, reporting Dylan’s words, “ ‘But this is what happened. Just like an actor who ends up on a TV show or in the movies, this is the gig I got. I was broke. Back in Minnesota, I played with other people. I got to New York and it was just myself.’
Playing opposite Timothée Chalamet’s sometimes cruel Bob Dylan in the new biopic, Fanning brings heart and complexity to a performance she’s been building up to.
“It’s not that he didn’t want to be a solo artist; it’s that he didn’t conceive of himself as only a solo artist. He said, ‘It’s really lonely being a solo act. You come there alone. You’re in the green room alone. You’re onstage alone. There’s no one to look to.’ He would get jealous of the camaraderie he saw in people who had bands.”
Mangold shows this through the onscreen Dylan’s admiration of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, and the way he lights up when his eventual bandmates transform his sound.
“It means his decision to go electric or have a band wasn’t purely, ‘I’m going to turn folk music on its head.’ It was a personal yearning, as opposed to an intellectual decision about the direction of his art,” Mangold says.
So, what was Dylan’s overall take on the project?
“He saw my endeavor as both trying to be loyal to the reality of the historical situation and also loyal to my duty to make something good, juicy, enticing and gripping out of it. Because without the second part, without the fact that it holds, you never have the audience. There is a magic that occurs where you gain greater understanding through the power of story and drama of what these people felt like than you would if you were just listing the dates and the facts.”
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