Edward Norton has joined the cast of A Complete Unknown, the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic from filmmaker James Mangold. Norton replaces fellow Marvel veteran Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of Pete Seeger, the legendary “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” singer who arguably represented the folk music status quo that Dylan came in and shook up in the early 1960s. The movie stars Dune‘s Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, and Nick Offerman. A Complete Unknown 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.
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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 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary of Dylan, titled No Direction Home, also drew its title from that same song.
“I’ve spent several, wonderfully charming, days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him,” Mangold said over the summer. “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 2001 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.
h/t Deadline
