\n<\/p>\n
Halfway through A Complete Unknown,<\/em> Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet<\/strong>-as-Bob Dylan<\/strong> 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 \u201cMr. Tambourine Man\u201d or the first verse of \u201cI\u2019ll Keep It With Mine.\u201d It\u2019s 1964, he\u2019s 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\u2019s director, James Mangold,<\/strong> was living with his parents, the artists Robert Mangold<\/strong> and Sylvia Plimack Mangold,<\/strong> in a Lower East Side apartment on Grand Street and Eldridge Street, existing in an art scene happening at the same time\u2014and on the same island\u2014as the folk explosion, and walking every day to public school at Orchard Street and Hester Street.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough I have no consciousness of my first three or four years, I do remember\u2014whether it\u2019s \u201968, \u201969, or \u201970\u2014the smell and taste and look of New York,\u201d filmmaker Mangold said on the phone this week, a few days removed from his film\u2019s securing eight Oscar nominations<\/a>, including for best director, screenplay, and picture. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n I wanted to talk to Mangold about how A Complete Unknown<\/em>\u2014and maybe even all of his films\u2014came out of the primordial ooze that was Manhattan in the \u201960s, 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.<\/p>\n Both mom and dad are still actively showing new work, but they\u2019re among the last remaining members of their cohort\u2014Richard 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\u2019s not a documentary; it\u2019s a Dylan-as-movie-star Hollywood picture that plays with fact and fiction like Robert Zimmerman does\u2014and it\u2019s hard to argue with the palpable energy of the period that\u2019s humming through the film. Even Dylan himself (at least we think it\u2019s Dylan\u2026) took to X to offer his support.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown<\/em> (what a title!),\u201d Dylan wrote<\/a>. \u201cTimothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy\u2019s a brilliant actor so I\u2019m sure he\u2019s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.\u201d<\/p>\n