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.
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….
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.