Jesse Hawken
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196: A Complete Unknown (with Jared Bailey)
🕑 Added 2025-01-13 01:03:10 +0000 UTCJared Bailey (aka Twitter’s @Stolendans) returns to the podcast from Columbia South Carolina for a show about James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger.
Choosing to portray the rise of Bob Dylan as a mainstream Music 101 period piece may have been a commercial choice that has rubbed some true Dylan Heads the wrong way, but the director has at least made an entertaining prestige picture that looks and feels right with Chalamet up to the challenge of playing a difficult part.
We discuss how this film retools the actual history for the sake of Hollywood conventions, how Mangold chooses to portray the women in Dylan’s life and the film’s cautious treatment of any political content, keeping things vague enough that it’s been left open to interpretation; in some conservative circles they think the film is really about Dylan the individual artist taking on the Marxist folk music scene, portrayed here as The Establishment.
Plus: Jared and I discuss Bob Dylan, the pioneer of singing with a funny voice (a big influence on Paul McCartney, we think) and dreamcast some future Dylan biopics!
Follow Jared Bailey on Twitter and Bluesky.
Trailer for A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)
'A Complete Unknown': The Ballad of Toshi, by Merrill Markoe from her Substack, December 23, 2024
The Highwaymen on the New Zealand talk show Holmes, 1991
Comments
Peter McKay
Great ep! I love hearing about Dylan radicalization journeys. Mine began when I noticed the line “crying like a fire in the sun” in Its All Over Now Baby Blue. It felt illegal almost. Another fond memory is of Eddie Vedder singing Masters of War at the Dylan 30th anniversary concert a hundred years ago. Pearl Jam was white hot and I’d never heard that song before.
Craig Johnson
An amazing elderly filmmaker friend of mine (celebrating her 90th birthday next week and still active in local social justice circles) confirmed for me that Alan Lomax was in fact a grade A asshole. This is obviously scurrilous but I'm throwing it in there anyway!
Jesse Hawken
Good catch!
Kenny Hedges
Strong biopic: Kinks movie. Banned from the US for trying to kill each other on stage. Mentioned here, as Bob Dylan's correspondence with Johnny Cash was in Walk the Line. That's a trilogy. You don't need a biopic when you have Masked & Anonymous. Blew the "Play it loud" moment but I mostly enjoyed it. The way it treated women was a little hard to take. It was a male voice that shouted "Judas" at the Royal Albert Hall show.
