Here’s the thing. James Mangold completely understands why Bob Dylan has not seen “A Complete Unknown” and may never see it. And it’s not personal. As Mangold reveals, “I’m told by his team management team that he’s never even seen the other movies that have been made about him, documentary or otherwise. Even ones where he’s participated in.” Why would this case be any different?

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Set between 1961-1965, “A Complete Unknown” is adapted from Elijah Wald’s novel “Dylan Goes Electric!” and follows the music icon from his earliest days as a fresh-faced folk singer (portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) in New York City. Dylan isn’t a producer. He didn’t sign his life rights away. He’s a public figure. But he did provide both Mangold and Chalamet with notes on the script.

“When I met with Dylan, he asked me what I thought the song was, the movie was about,” Mangold recalls. “I said I saw it very much kind of like a circular ballad about a guy who’s suffocating and leaves Minnesota and friends and family behind, comes to New York, reinvents himself, makes new family, new friends blossoms and starts to suffocate again and leaves again. And that, in that sense, it’s a repeat maybe for his whole life.”

Even at the age of 83, Mangold thinks Dylan is just living his life and making his art. And what Dylan decides to partake of and what he decides to have space from is his personal decision. And Mangold is grateful that he got what he got.

“What I’m grateful to him for is that he gave me his time when I needed it, and he gave me input and insight into who he is and how he felt in 1961, two, three, and four, and what he was desiring and why he did what he did,” Mangold says. “That helped me understand and, in ways, demystify that he wasn’t trying to change the course of American folk music. He was trying to escape suffocation from a family in a world that he could no longer live in. It was as much a musical revolution as it was a Thanksgiving dinner gone awry.”

Most importantly, Mangold didn’t set out to make the definitive movie about Dylan’s life. Sure, his relationships with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning), Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) are represented. But you’ll still have questions, and Mangold embraces that.

“I would never try to tackle Bob Dylan’s life and some cradle-to-grave synopsis. I think that’s a disaster,” Mangold suggests. “And I think most of the time when people do biopics, they somehow imagine they’ll start with a baby being born and end with a gravestone. The reality is that just like making a fiction film to make a biopic not feel like a biopic, it needs to have a story with the same thematic plot integrity as a fiction film would have. And therefore, you’ve kind of got to let go of these different crutches. One is that just because it happened doesn’t mean it’s interesting or even dramatic.”

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Despite being in the public eye for over six decades, Dylan is still one of the most enigmatic cultural icons of the latter half of the 20th Century. Mangold realizes that many people are always focused on “why Bob does what Bob does.” Especially since Dylan has made career choices that have surprised people. Mangold, who already fashioned a biopic on musical icons Johnny Cash and June Carter in “Walk the Line,” actually feels empathetic towards him.

“How does he even begin to cope with the amount of people tracing his every step and utterance? The guy sings 25 songs in our movie, which are nothing but gigantic personal monologues,” Mangold says. “I mean, he’s been revealing himself to us for 50 years in a prolific body of work. Unparalleled. Filled with personal observations and lyrics and novels and nonfiction work and screenplays and speeches for the Nobel Prize that are all self-revelatory. But we still like, ‘I don’t know enough, he’s still too enigmatic.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what exactly do we want? Do we want him to have some simple Freudian moment where he just confesses a childhood trauma that makes all of him make sense?’”

Still, Mangold knows he’s going to be asked about what Dylan thought about the movie for the rest of his own life. He also sounds convinced that Dylan will never see it.

“If I saw the Gregory Elwood story and I hired Timothee Chalamet to play you, the whole thing would be a completely surreal experience,” Mangold suggests. “You’d be out of body the whole time. You’d be rolling your eyes and squirming, going, ‘Ugh.’ The reality is that I’m not forcing him to have to confront that. And he will when he is ready. And that could be tomorrow, and it could be a year from now, and it could be never. But he did read the script, and it is the script [that’s in the movie]. It begins and ends exactly the same. So, the reality is he knew what we were doing, and he knew how we were doing it. And other than that, it’s honestly not my concern.”

“A Complete Unknown” is now playing nationwide