Yahoo Lifestyle ‘A Complete Unknown’: Read The Screenplay That Plugs Into The Moment Bob Dylan Became An Icon
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series shining a spotlight on the scripts behind the year’s buzziest awards-season movies continues with Searchlight’s A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s micro-biopic of Bob Dylan that stars Timothée Chalamet. Mangold adapted the script with two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jay Cocks, working from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.
The film hit theaters December 25 and grossed $31.7 million over the holiday frame. It has also been racking up nominations on the awards circuit, with Best Picture, Best Actor (for Chalamet) and Best Supporting Actor (for Edward Norton) nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards.
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In addition to Chalamet, the film stars Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Norton as Pete Seeger, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash.
The focus of the story is a four-year span in Dylan’s life beginning with the 19-year-old’s arrival in New York, his rapid rise in the folk music movement there, and the now-infamous moment during his set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he plugged in his electric guitar, changing the direction of the music world in one note.
Mangold, who explored the rise of Cash in 2005’s Walk the Line, similarly was pulled to the coming-to-be story of a future rock icon with Dylan, and said he spoke in person with the 10-time Grammy winner during the writing and preproduction process.
“You can be really good at writing songs and you can be really good at recording them and singing them and playing them,” Mangold says, “but that doesn’t make you necessarily good or receptive to what stardom or fame brings or the burdens of putting a shine on and being available to millions of people who love you or hate you or resent you or have expectations for you.”
Cocks, Oscar-nominated for writing the screenplays for the Martin Scorsese movies The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, had been working on the script first, developing it with Dylan’s longtime manager and one of the film’s producers Jeff Rosen, who had initially optioned Wald’s 2015 book. Cocks, a former Time magazine film and music critic, also wrote Scorsese’s Silence and, from James Cameron’s original script, Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fil thriller Strange Days.
Read the A Complete Unknown script below.
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