How does it feel?

A Complete Unknown retells Bob Dylan's explosive rise, but it als resonates with today's toxic fame and politics. The creative team expl their process-and wha the singer made of it all

- By Alexis Petridis

BOB DYLAN IS NOTORIOUSLY averse to others poking around in his past - he once suggested the legions of self-styled "Dylanologists" who examine his career in forensic detail should "get a life, please... you're wasting your life". So when he summoned director James Mangold to discuss the upcoming Dylan biopic Mangold was making, it had the potential to go badly.

The film, A Complete Unknown, was already well under way. A script based on folk musician and writer Elijah Wald's acclaimed 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! had been written by Jay Cocks, best known as the screenwriter of Gangs of New York. Timothée Chalamet was slated to star as Dylan: perfect for the role, Mangold suggests, because "he's thin and wiry and mercurial and super smart and restless and he's also a really fucking good actor".

Meanwhile, Mangold had set about rewriting, amplifying "the personal relationships" in the story, so that Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Sylvia, a character based on Dylan's then girlfriend Suze Rotolo, became "monumentally larger roles".

This decision, he says tactfully, "caused some concern in the Dylan camp". Not that Dylan himself had read any version of the script: as Wald was informed, when he inquired whether the singer had shown any interest in his book: "Bob doesn't read about Dylan." But then Covid brought Dylan's fabled "never ending tour" to a temporary halt. He requested a copy of the script, and Mangold went to meet him in a coffee shop. Initially, Dylan seemed more interested in discussing Cop Land, Mangold's 1997 drama about police corruption, than the film being made about his own life.