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James Mangold Explains What A Complete Unknown Is Really About
The A Complete Unknown director got into filmmaking because he was lonely. It’s a quality he also saw in Bob Dylan.
His filmography — which really got started after an abortive early stint at Disney, where he co-wrote Oliver & Company — thus runs the gamut from crime epics like Copland to psychological dramas like Girl, Interrupted, to westerns like 3:10 to Yuma, to action rom-coms like Knight and Day, to superhero movies like Logan and The Wolverine, to the most recent Indiana Jones sequel. The two movies are quite different, though they bear some distinctly Mangoldian qualities: They’re vivid dives into their milieus ( A Complete Unknown ’s re-creation of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s is thoroughly transporting), and they’re fundamentally character dramas about the collision of people with different sensibilities. Indeed, while Chalamet’s performance is remarkable, what really comes through in A Complete Unknown — by design — is the effect Dylan’s genius had on the people around him, including folk icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the singer Joan Baez (a stunning Monica Barbaro), a legend in her own right.
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