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The biopic, with Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, is peppered with figures from the folk world and beyond. These are some of them.
Dec. 25, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET
In some ways, the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” is a family drama.
The director James Mangold saw the climax of the film, Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where his choice to perform backed by an electrified rock band caused an uproar among the folk-music establishment, as “a kind of Thanksgiving blowup, a holiday dinner gone awry in which a prodigal son comes out and won’t toe the family line anymore, and tries to demonstrate his independence.”
The story follows Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) over the foundational years leading up to that concert. It begins with his arrival in New York City in 1961. These are some of the people he meets along the way.
Pete Seeger (Edward Norton)
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Dylan entered a folk music scene largely shaped by Pete Seeger. Seeger’s influence was multifaceted: After helping found the leftist folk group the Almanac Singers in the 1940s, he went on to success as a solo artist and as a member of the Weavers. He both interpreted established folk songs and wrote his own, which were often overtly political but not always. “There were all these different strains of the folk music revival, or scene, whatever you want to call it,” said the music historian and musician Elijah Wald, “and all of them came out of Pete Seeger.” (Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!” was the basis for “A Complete Unknown.”) Mangold saw Seeger and Dylan as akin to father and son, or brothers. “There’s a kind of cleave that develops between them over ideology or dogma,” he said, “Or if anything, Bob’s absence of a dogma — that he kind of just wants to be free without fences.”
Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy)
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The young Dylan was influenced by both the music of Woody Guthrie and the self-mythologizing of Guthrie’s partly fictional autobiography, “Bound for Glory” (1943). During his early days in New York, Dylan tracked down the older man, but by this point in Guthrie’s life, the voice that had, perhaps most famously, once sung “This Land Is Your Land,” had been taken by Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative illness that led to Guthrie’s living out his final years at psychiatric hospitals in New Jersey and New York. Yesi Ramirez, the casting director for “A Complete Unknown,” gave a disclaimer to actors up for the part of the older artist: “Look, there are no lines. His disease does not permit him to speak.” The film, doing a little mythologizing of its own, takes liberties with how and where Dylan meets him. But the connection it shows was real. “Everybody who was close to Woody remembers Dylan as having been particularly devoted, and as Woody particularly liking him,” Wald said. “That was a unique relationship.”
