Johnny Cash Plays Important Role in New Bob Dylan Film
On Christmas, the new biopic film about Bob Dylan called A Complete Unknown will open in theaters. And just like the real life story of Dylan, Johnny Cash will play an important role.
A Complete Unknown does not cover the complete life of Bob Dylan, but focuses on his life starting in the early 1960s when he moves from Minnesota to New York, up to the moment in 1965 when Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.
Bob Dylan didn’t “go country” until 1966’s Blonde on Blonde recorded in Nashville, and later 1969’s Nashville Skyline. This late 1960’s period is also the era that Dylan made his landmark appearances on The Johnny Cash Show.
But 1964 is when Dylan and Cash first met. The two songwriters both played the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. As Dylan was becoming a pariah to his own proponents by moving away from his acoustic folk sound, Cash was one of the few who supported and defended him, which can be seen in part in the film trailer (see below).
Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in the film, and Boyd Holbrook is cast as Johnny Cash. “I’m not sure they wanna hear what I wanna play, Johnny,” Chalamet’s Dylan says in the trailer. “I wanna hear it,” Cash says before adding, “Make some noise, Big D.”
A Complete Unknown also has another major tie-in to the life of Johnny Cash. The film’s director and co-writer is James Mangold, who also directed the well-received 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line starring Joaquin Phoenix. Mangold says the two films vary significantly since Cash’s legacy is very much defined by his childhood trauma, while Dylan is more of a mystery.
Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Mavis Staples, and other important musical characters also appear in the film. But Johnny Cash’s role will give something for country fans to look forward to in a movie that is expected to win rave reviews and could earn major awards.
November 30, 2024 @ 9:10 am
I am very much looking forward to this movie.
November 30, 2024 @ 11:15 am
The Walk the Line biopic was good. This looks well worth watching.
November 30, 2024 @ 11:23 am
I wish they would make a sequel to Walk the Line, covering his life from 1969 until his death. There’s so much story that can be told during that timeframe.
November 30, 2024 @ 11:41 am
Yes, covering Cash’s years from when he got dropped from his label, to signing with Rick Rubin, to his death would make for a compelling movie.
December 4, 2024 @ 2:10 pm
Compelling? Compelling you to do what, Sir?
“Write” about something which cannot be saved without being sung?
dude, too much sugar for a dime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRdxUFDoQe0
December 5, 2024 @ 8:12 am
Truth be told, Cash engineered his own demise at Columbia.
When his contract was up Cash demanded a new deal commensurate with the one his daughter Rosanne Cash had Rosanne was also on Columbia scoring #1 hits and selling millions of albums. Concurrently Johnny’s stock had fallen significantly. He had not had any solo hits since 1981 and his current album sales had cratered. Even his catalog album sales had plummeted. Cash was not generating anywhere near the sales he had a decade earlier. As a lifelong Cash fan even I found most of his final Columbia albums uninspired. The only bright spot for him was his Highwaymen collaborations.
The money that Cash demanded from Columbia for a new deal was not realistic. Mercury Records offered him more money but before Cash could announce that move himself a newspaper journalist jumped the gun and printed the story without authorization. Columbia was unfairly painted as the “bad guy” but that was not accurate. It was a business decision and the numbers didn’t add up.
And that’s why it’s called the music business.
If a Cash movie sequel is ever made dealing with that era of his life hopefully they would set that record straight. But Hollywood loves conflict & drama so they would probably continue that false narrative. Cash had also fallen back into his drug habits at the time which adversely affected his judgement especially concerning his music.
November 30, 2024 @ 12:18 pm
Hollywood simply can’t afford to do that. They need to allocate those dollars to the year’s 50th Marvel/DC comic book movie….
December 3, 2024 @ 4:10 pm
I love them both. Gonna go see the movie.
November 30, 2024 @ 4:46 pm
According to Wikipedia, the phenomenal Dave Van Ronk will be depicted as well. And hopefully Phil Ochs will be there somewhere, even though he may not come off particularly well given the time period. They had a falling out in 1965 that lasted nine years.
Regardless, this should be an interesting film. Mangold is usually on point.
December 1, 2024 @ 7:55 am
The obnoxious Van Ronk character depicted in the Cohen Brothers’ “Inside Llewellyn Davis” some years ago did not much resemble the real-life version. The latter was remarkably intelligent, colorful, funny, and gifted, a giant of his era. He deserves, in other words, to be treated as more than a fellow folk musician who happened to hang out with Dylan early in his career. These days I rarely listen to Dylan, but from time to time I do return to Van Ronk’s recordings, which seem never to age.
November 30, 2024 @ 5:37 pm
Looking forward to seeing this, they filmed a bunch in a park in my town, lots of vintage cars staged in a nearby movie theater lot. Should be good!
December 1, 2024 @ 3:11 pm
Clearly, Mangold is using WALK THE LINE and A COMPLETE UNKNOWN to lay the foundation for an epic Carl Perkins capstone bio-pic.
December 1, 2024 @ 5:06 pm
Carl Perkins and Conway Twitty are long overdue for some serious rediscovery.
Many years ago, I used to say that Twitty was one song in a Tarantino movie away from a newfound post-mortem stardom, but these are different times, sadly.
December 1, 2024 @ 5:33 pm
For whatever reason, Twitty’s smooth-talking come-on songs and performances strike Gen Z’ers or Millennials or whatever the current generation are called as incredibly dorky, rather than debonaire. He has not aged well, like, say, Lou Rawls.The pastel leisure suits and highly-coiffed hair are certainly part of it. The cartoon sit-com “Family Guy” evdently used to dump clips of Conway into the middle of episodes, for laughs. Twitty videos on Y-T were filled with comments along the lines of “I came here from Family Guy,” preceding some sort of insult.
December 2, 2024 @ 2:13 pm
Love Conway. That said, some of his songs are a little cringy these days. He’s certainly not the only one that can be said of. Mac Davis has one as well. Specifically, the whole “young girl” thing doesn’t age well.
December 4, 2024 @ 2:31 pm
It took him years fo get over getting knocked out of his Twittly Bird nest by Elvis
Next came years of musical pantyhose and beehive hairdo fantasies uttered ala “Whispering Bill Anderson”
Which after years of recycling this mantra resulted in one good song, Play Guitar Play’, possibly due to Grady Martin’s participation on guitar.
In short, Harold Jenkins, much as Rush Limbaugh, grabbed at the lowest hanging fruit right up to the point it became rotten to his own taste.
December 4, 2024 @ 2:01 pm
git yer hans offa Chonnee’s dead body, boy
you aint savin nuffin
I heard that hearse a comin, It wuz comin round the [boom chick boom chick]
December 9, 2024 @ 8:46 pm
Saw Dylan when he was a “tag-along” of Joan Baez. In Philly. My girlfriend of the time was there for Baez. She didn’t know who Dylan was. I was into coffee houses and folk music. In one just south of NYC, a guy would sing Dylan songs he had heard in New York. Then a woman who sold record albums gave me Dylan’s first and only album at that time. I was hooked and have forever been. Poet of the age.