Searchlight Pictures has released an interesting behind-the-scene featurette for director James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic film A Complete Unknown.
The video features interviews with the cast and crew of the film as they talk about Dylan’s story, his music, and bringing that start to life for the big screen.
Mangold says, “His genius in the power of the songs and personality ends up elevating until he is bigger than the movement he was taken into.”
Timothée Chalamet takes on the role of Bob Dylan, and the story is set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s, and the story follows the 19-year-old Minnesota musician’s meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation – culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Dylan “shakes up the music world in 1965, as he pivots to performing with an electric guitar for the first time.” He “embraced rock n roll and traded his acoustic guitar for an amp and an electric guitar,” which “created a huge outcry.” But “it cemented the status of rock music.”
Chalamet performs the music in the film with singing, guitar, and harmonica. The actor says he chose to do that because it was in the “spirit of the movie to do it live.”
The film also stars Edward Norton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz and Scoot McNairy.
Mangold previously talked about the film, saying: “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young, 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with like two dollars in his pocket.”
He added that the musician was “embraced into the family of folk music in New York and then, of course, kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief.”
The script for the film was written by Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York) with Mangold doing revisions on it. Dylan’s longtime manager Jeff Rosen is a producer on the film.
The movie will hit theaters on December 25th.
