Most musician biopics follow a familiar arc — a rise and fall, fueled by the childhood trauma behind it all, then a third-act redemption tied to a career peak. The rise usually involves a montage of tour buses and adoring audiences, the fall a montage of drug use and mistreatment of friends or colleagues. By 2007, the formula was so well established that it inspired the parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. More recently, Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, imaginative as they were, leaned on some of the same tropes.
As the producers behind the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown developed the project, they faced the challenge of making a film that didn’t rely on those plot points, about an iconic singer-songwriter who seldom reveals much. Dylan never derailed his career with a debilitating drug problem (his 1966 tour was fueled by amphetamines, by many accounts, and a motorcycle accident that summer gave him the chance to take some time off), and his career doesn’t have a clear arc so much as a series of sudden left turns. He established himself as a folk singer, then left that scene behind to become a rock star — then veered into country, made an album about his divorce and recorded three gospel albums as a born-again Christian, all in the first two decades of a career that has lasted more than six. It’s not an easy story to make into a film, let alone one with commercial appeal.
The film works, though. As of the first week of February, the movie has grossed more than $67 million in the U.S. and more than another $20 million abroad, according to Box Office Mojo, and it’s already one of the 10 most successful music biopics in history. It has also received critical acclaim, and numerous Academy Award nominations — including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Timothée Chalamet as Dylan), Best Supporting Actress (for Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez), and Best Supporting Actor (for Edward Norton as a note-perfect Pete Seeger). Just as important for Dylan and the companies that have the rights to his music — Universal Music Group owns his publishing, Sony Music his recordings — the film has introduced both his story and his music to a younger generation.
From the beginning, the idea behind the film was to focus on a few years of Dylan’s life, from his 1961 arrival in New York to the summer of 1965, when he “went electric” by performing live with a rock band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s company had been developing a project set at this time, and in 2016 it optioned the rights to the Elijah Wald book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, which HBO planned to develop into a film. Jack Cocks, who is credited with co-writing the screenplay to A Complete Unknown, wrote a script, but the project never moved forward.
A few years later, Alex Heineman asked his friend and fellow film producer Fred Berger if he would be interested in making some kind of Dylan biopic. “I asked, ‘How did you get the rights?’” Berger remembers. “And he said, ‘I don’t have them.’” The two went to Dylan’s management, which told them that HBO had the rights to another project.
Meanwhile, Berger and Heineman reached out to Chalamet, who was interested in playing Dylan. When the rights to the project became available in 2019, it ended up at Searchlight Pictures, with James Mangold directing — but it didn’t start shooting for another few years. “We got Searchlight and then we got Jim [Mangold], and then we got COVID,” says a source close to Dylan. After that came the writer’s strike.
By then, Mangold, along with Berger and Heineman and Dylan’s team, had the story, as well as an approach. “James Mangold and I and the other producers have a similar feeling about biopics, which is that a cradle-to-grave approach is an expanded Wikipedia page,” Berger says. (Mangold shares a co-writing credit with Cocks.) The director “focused on a narrow period of time” that offered a compelling story to make a larger point about Dylan and what drives him.
In his book, Wald shows that Dylan’s decision to go electric wasn’t just a matter of instrumentation but of leaving the folk scene, with its focus on authenticity and leftist politics, for a rock band and a style that involved more leather jackets than workwear. The original approach for the movie would have spent more time on that political context but the film casts the conflict in more personal terms: Dylan needs to turn away from familial figures, including Pete Seeger, in order to follow his muse. Mangold “approaches story from character,” Berger says. “It’s not about acoustic versus electric — it’s about the family that lifted him up and how those relationships are on the line.”
The stakes are personal, in other words, so A Complete Unknown lacks a rousing resolution, as well as rousing music to accompany it. (The last song Dylan is seen playing in the film is the same song that ended his actual Newport set, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” an acoustic kiss-off to a scene he had outgrown.) Afterward, Dylan seems to be contemplating his next move, rather than rejoicing in triumph, as Queen is seen doing in Bohemian Rhapsody after the scene set at its Live Aid performance.
It’s hard to know what the success of A Complete Unknown might mean for future music films, but it certainly opens up more possibilities. Coincidentally, one of the next rock biopics to come out will be Deliver Me from Nowhere, a movie about Bruce Springsteen essentially going acoustic, on his 1982 album Nebraska. (It’s Springsteen’s darkest and least commercial album, so don’t expect anthemic music there, either.) It will be interesting to see how that does — and what other stories will follow it to the big screen.
