The Book Review11 Feb 2025

Is Bob Dylan Still a ‘Complete Unknown’?

Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” traces the events that led up to Bob Dylan’s memorable performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The book is about Dylan, but also about the folk movement, youth culture, politics and the record business. For the writer and director James Mangold, Wald’s work provided an opportunity to tell an unusual story about the musician.

“You could structure a screenplay along the lines of what Peter Shaffer did with “Amadeus,’” Mangold told the Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz. “I don’t really know what I learned about Mozart watching “Amadeus.” But I do know that I learned a lot about how we mortals feel about people with immense talent.”

Mangold’s film “A Complete Unknown” is a chronicle of Dylan’s early years on the New York folk scene, and it avoids easy explanations for the musician’s genius and success. “What if the thing we don’t understand, we just don’t want to understand,” said Mangold, “which is that he’s actually different? That he’s just a different kind of person than you or I?”

In the second episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Mangold about making a film centered on one of music’s most enigmatic figures.

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