Did Walk Strong: The Dewey Cox Is the story a scathing satire of the rhythms of the musical biopic genre? Yes.
Do James Mangoldwho wrote and directed Follow the line, which is heavily referenced in the 2007 comedy film, do you think this temporarily killed the musical biopic? Not even a little bit.
Clearly, Mangold didn’t let that stop him. He’s back this Christmas with A complete stranger, a film that gives Bob Dylan – and his rise as a folk artist and his pivot to the electric – the biopic treatment.
The film follows a young Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) during his trip to New York, he met folk icons Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), and began to become known as a singer-songwriter. Along the way, he struck up a romance with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and shares a romantic adventure with fellow artist Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).
Photos by Macall Polay/Searchlight
Mangold doesn’t worry at all about people singling him out Walk strong like a lens through which to see A complete stranger.
“I’ve found Walk strong hilarious,” says Mangold Weekly Entertainment. “But I also never understood why satire would get in the way of making an actual film. I was no more afraid than Robert Eggers should be afraid of making a monster movie facing Young Frankenstein or if another filmmaker might be afraid of making a western facing Flaming Saddles. It’s unfair to say that if someone satirizes a genre, it makes them a tombstone forever. It seems a bit ridiculous to me.”
Mangold admits the genre fell out of favor shortly after Walk strong came out, but he doesn’t think there’s any correlation between those two things. “It’s just that they had run their course at that point,” he says. “It takes so long to make a film that I don’t think things work in an instantaneous way, where everyone suddenly stays apart.”
Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Honestly, Mangold’s biggest problem with Walk strong was the fact that the studio was willing to give the satire a larger budget than Follow the line. “I was even more upset that the studio that made the movie paid twice as much for Walk strong and refused to pay half the price for Follow the line,“, he jokes. (He had the last word while Follow the line grossed approximately $186.7 at the worldwide box office on a budget of $28 million, while Walk strong grossed only $18 million, well below its $35 million budget).
But Mangold cautions any filmmaker not to take the cynicism (or even good-natured mockery) of a satire too much to heart. “We live in such ironic times that sometimes there are good clichés to avoid, but there are also some things we should hold on to,” he notes. “Trope is not a negative word if you look it up.”
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“There are traditions that are beautiful to perpetuate,” he concludes. “For those of us in the filmmaking business who think so or in the serious filmmaking business, I remain steadfastly optimistic and idealistic in my work. I don’t want to be satirical in telling stories. Just because they have echoes in other stories doesn’t mean they aren’t relevant.”