TEASER - 196: A Complete Unknown (with Jared Bailey)

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Jared 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)

The Highwaymen on the New Zealand talk show Holmes, 1991