Halfway through A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob Dylan breezes through his apartment on the third floor of 161 West 4th Street, working his way through the lyrics to a new song, hopping onto a typewriter to bang out the last verse of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or the first verse of “I’ll Keep It With Mine.” It’s 1964, he’s famous enough to get mobbed by beatniks in record stores, and he tools around Greenwich Village on his Triumph motorcycle. Funny thing about that: In real-life 1964, just a few blocks away from Dylan, the film’s director, James Mangold, was living with his parents, the artists Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, in a Lower East Side apartment on Grand Street and Eldridge Street, existing in an art scene happening at the same time—and on the same island—as the folk explosion, and walking every day to public school at Orchard Street and Hester Street.
“Although I have no consciousness of my first three or four years, I do remember—whether it’s ’68, ’69, or ’70—the smell and taste and look of New York,” filmmaker Mangold said on the phone this week, a few days removed from his film’s securing eight Oscar nominations, including for best director, screenplay, and picture. “I passed the Hebrew booksellers and the pickle vendors and the construction companies and trucking companies and the steam plants and the many languages being spoken all around me, the delis and the clubs and galleries, and the scene of New York is very vivid to me in my childhood. The smell of salted knishes on the corner. And that world was definitely a kind of guiding light for me making the movie.”
I wanted to talk to Mangold about how A Complete Unknown—and maybe even all of his films—came out of the primordial ooze that was Manhattan in the ’60s, where he lived for the first decade of his life, when his parents were hanging with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko as part of a new generation of painters that included their close friends Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt.
Both mom and dad are still actively showing new work, but they’re among the last remaining members of their cohort—Richard Serra, Chuck Close, and Brice Marden were all colleagues of theirs who graduated from Yale in the early 1960s, and all died in the last few years. By making a movie about Dylan, Mangold has brought some of that era back to life, in full, luminous detail. One can bicker about the liberties taken by the filmmaker, but it’s not a documentary; it’s a Dylan-as-movie-star Hollywood picture that plays with fact and fiction like Robert Zimmerman does—and it’s hard to argue with the palpable energy of the period that’s humming through the film. Even Dylan himself (at least we think it’s Dylan…) took to X to offer his support.
“There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!),” Dylan wrote. “Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”
By Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures / Everett Collection.
Young Jim Mangold grew up surrounded by artists and going to galleries, and sometimes cheering on the New York Jets at Shea Stadium with LeWitt—he and Robert Mangold split season tickets. His first exposure to film of any kind may have been in the West 29th Street loft of artists Yvonne Jacquette and Rudy Burckhardt, who had a projector to show their art films. One of his parents’ closest friends was Red Grooms, who staged happenings at his studio right around the corner, at Delancey Street and Suffolk Street, and was making the enormous works he called sculpto-picto-ramas, which proved irresistible to a young boy like Jim Mangold.
“It was a really wonderful, eclectic, and charismatic bunch of artists in my parents’ world, all of whom were really funky, interesting characters,” he said. “And that sense of growing up in something like that definitely informed this film.”
This wasn’t really Dylan’s milieu per se, but there was certainly some overlap. Dylan met Andy Warhol through Edie Sedgwick, a story dramatized in a—to put it charitably—movie less successful than A Complete Unknown. After Warhol gifted him the painting Silver Double Elvis, Dylan drove the artwork up to Woodstock strapped to the top of his car. He later traded what’s probably a $50 million artwork to his manager Albert Grossman for a sofa. Grossman’s wife ended up selling it at auction, where it was bought by real estate developer Jerry Spiegel for a reported $750,000, and he ultimately donated it to MoMA. Dylan told Spin in 1985 that if Warhol “had another painting he would give me, I’d never do it again.”
The Mangolds got even closer to Dylan’s orbit after Marden, their Yale classmate, married Pauline Baez, with her little sister Joan Baez bringing her boyfriend Bob over to Marden and Pauline’s Avenue C loft. Marden said they would all sing songs for hours, and he got along so well with Dylan that he made him a minimalist two-tone work, The Dylan Painting, which is in the collection of SFMOMA.
Marden later said this about Dylan: “Whenever I run into him now, he looks at me and says, ‘Still painting?’”
Mangold said he doesn’t think his parents ever met Dylan, or at least they’ve never mentioned it, and they probably would have mentioned it. His dad was a big Dylan fan and introduced his son to the music in the ’70s: “The cassette of his greatest hits that he would play in his VW bus,” Mangold said wistfully. By this time they had moved out of the city, first to Callicoon Center, in the Catskills, and then to Washingtonville, a commuter town.
“It was a town mostly of cops and firemen from New York and other civil workers, people who commuted to New York City for their jobs and lived in the Hudson Valley—and I was the half-Jewish son of two fine artists making art,” he told me. “That was fairly hard for my community, my local suburban community, to understand. The fact that my dad painted color fields on a canvas with a single line meant I would have very perplexed friends who would come over and go, ‘That’s what your dad does?’”
Robert Mangold also encouraged in young Jim a love of cinema, as the director’s artist parents had what he called a “liberal” approach to the kinds of movies kids could see: “I saw Taxi Driver in its first week, and God knows what my age was, but probably 13.”
