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‘It’s full of things that didn’t happen – but it feels right!’ Inside the making of Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown

Starring an Oscar-tipped Timothée Chalamet, James Mangold’s biopic retells Dylan’s electric early career, but it resonates with today’s toxic fame and politics. The creative team explain their process – and what Dylan makes of it

As he rapidly ascends from Seeger’s young protege to the folk scene’s brightest star, to an artist who single-handedly alters the face of pop music, you are left in no doubt of Dylan’s genius – it’s very good at capturing the shock and awe of audiences encountering Blowin’ in the Wind or The Times They Are A-Changin’ not as august standards, but freshly written material. Certainly, A Complete Unknown portrays Dylan as a bit of a pain in the arse, mercurial to the point of treating friends and lovers in a cavalier manner, and an Olympic-standard fibber to boot: Baez and Russo go from vying for his affections to independently tiring of his bullshit. But it’s hard to think of a fandom more toxic than Dylan’s in the 60s, sections of which first took to booing him and comparing him to Judas, or calling him “a bastard” because he had changed musical direction, and then set about making his life a misery: picketing his home, attempting to break in, rifling through his rubbish, coming up with absurd theories about his politics and drug use.

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