Why is Christmas Day so right for the nationwide opening of the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown”?
Because, according to co-writer and director James Mangold, Dylan’s life has a magical aspect of divine destiny.
“There was a wonderful book,” Mangold, 61, said in a virtual press conference, “that tracked this convulsion in 1965” – Dylan’s cultural earthquake, going electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
“It occurred to me that this should begin with his arrival in New York as a fairy tale. This man with no name and a notebook, landing at the bedside of his hero in New Jersey” – the folk legend Woody Guthrie (“This Land is Your Land”) who’s slowly dying of inherited Huntington’s disease.
“That this is a true story blows my mind,” Mangold allowed.
“From that moment, the young man arriving, he becomes one of the most important cultural figures in a century — in four years! Between the ages of 19 and 23!”
Dylan, a Nobel Prize winning poet, songwriter and performer, also ranks among the most enigmatic. Mangold chronicles Dylan’s Greenwich Village roots, performing in basement coffee houses, recording, forming a romantic and professional partnership with folk singer activist Joan Baez.
Timothée Chalamet, a likely Oscar nominee, like everyone in the cast plays and sings live.
“I wasn’t in the Church of Bob, which I am in now,” Chalamet, 28, explained. With a trim moustache and wavy head of hair he looks quite different than he does onscreen.
“The years I got to prepare for this role was in my other roles. It’s a process of osmosis and living in world of ‘60s. There were tidbits and learning about it. James had it that it was a fable and we should listen to the music.”
Mangold credits his success with “Walk the Line,” his Oscar-winning 2005 musical biopic of Johnny Cash, making “Unknown” possible.
“That gave me confidence about my instincts. On this I knew I can’t have Bob’s voice come out of Tim’s mouth — that’s never going to work.
“When we started shooting the first song was the song for Woody Guthrie in the hospital and Timmy came and said, ‘I just want to do it.’
“And my hat’s off! Because he just wanted to do it – and he did. There was nothing to fix later. He proved the method to the madness. There were choices he made – and he was free to act.”
“Walk the Line,” he realized, “was such a powerful lesson to me. If I had not made a movie like this before and had tech people coming at me in all directions with their heads exploding, saying, ‘You can’t do it this way,’ I might have hesitated.
“But because we had pushed those boundaries before, I knew if you give these actors a space they might fill it.”
“A Complete Unknown” opens Dec. 25