Bob Dylan "Personally Annotated" Script for Timothée Chalamet Biopic

By Russ Burlingame

Music legend Bob Dylan, who has been the subject of more than one attempt at a biopic already as well as starring in a few movies in his own right, was apparently fairly hands-on while filmmaker James Mangold and star Timothée Chalamet were developing their upcoming film A Complete Unknown, a movie about Dylan that co-stars Elle Fanning, Benedict Cumberbatch and Boyd Holbrook. The movie centers on Dylan's early days in New York's folk scene, and Mangold describes it as a critique on musical gatekeeping and tribalism, as much as it is about Dylan himself.

The title comes from a line in Dylan's seminal 1965 song "Like A Rolling Stone." It was released on Highway 61 Revisited, an album that dropped a few months after Dylan famously split the folk scene by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in March of that year. A 2011 biography of Dylan, titled No Direction Home, also drew its title from that same song. A documentary film about Dylan 

"I've spent several, wonderfully charming, days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him," Mangold told Variety. "I have a script that's personally annotated by him and treasured by me. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, 'I love Cop Land.'"

Cop Land, which starred Sylvester Stallone and Ray Liotta, was Mangold's second feature film as a director. The movie came out in 1997, just as Dylan was coming out of a years-long creative funk to release his game-changing record Time Out of Mind.

"The best true-life movies are never cradle to grave but they're about a very specific moment," Mangold said. "In this case, it might be presumptuous to call it Altman-esque, but it's a kind of ensemble piece about this moment in time, the early '60s in New York, and this 17-year-old kid with $16 in his pockets hitchhikes his way to New York to meet Woody Guthrie who is in the hospital and is dying of a nerve disease. He sings Woody a song that he wrote for him and befriends Pete Seeger, who is like a son to Woody, and Pete sets him up with gigs at local clubs and there you meet Joan Baez and all these other people who are part of this world."

Mangold's Dylan biopic, which is certainly "indie" and "low-budget" relative to his recent efforts like Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is set up through Focus Features. There is no release date yet.

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