Benedict Cumberbatch is the latest actor to jump on board director James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Cumberbatch joins the previously cast Timothée Chalamet (Dune) and Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick), and Elle Fanning (Super 8, The Neon Demon, The Great).
The movie centers on a young Bob Dylan (Chalamet), who “shakes up the music world in 1965, as he pivots to performing with an electric guitar for the first time.” Dylan “embraced rock n roll and traded his acoustic guitar for an amp and an electric guitar,” which “created a huge outcry.” But “it cemented the status of rock music.”
Cumberbatch will take on the role of Pete Seeger, the late folk legend, singer, and activist who met Dylan at a formative age and helped usher him into the folk scene. He will be great in that role. Fanning will take on the role of Dylan’s early ’60s love interest, university student and artist Sylvie Russo.
When talking about the film in an interview with Collider, Mangold said: “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young, 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with like two dollars in his pocket. He added that the musician was “embraced into the family of folk music in New York and then, of course, kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief.”
The script for the film was written by Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York) with Mangold doing revisions on it. Dylan’s longtime manager Jeff Rosen is a producer on the film.
Source: RollingStone
