Boyd Holbrook On Portraying Johnny Cash In 'A Complete Unknown': 'We're Here To Celebrate These People's Lives'

Depicting a real-life person on film is a challenge, but that is an even greater responsibility when the individual is a pop culture icon like Johnny Cash. Yet Boyd Holbrook triumphs bringing The Man In Black to the screen in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold (Walk The Line, Ford v Ferrari).

The movie, released on Christmas in the US, has already proven a cross-generational hit, receiving multiple Golden Globes nominations, including 'Best Motion Picture – Drama', and is tipped for success at the Academy Awards.

"I'm kind of beside myself, too, just being a part of this film," Holbrook enthuses. "Bob Dylan especially, and Johnny Cash, had such an influence in my life in my early 20s – you know, discovering that music and just being so aware of poetry in life and how powerful one's songs can be."

Holbrook is Zooming from a cosy office – all dirty blond locks and striking blue eyes. He has had a steady rise. In his hometown of Prestonsburg, in Appalachian, Kentucky, Holbrook was spotted by a modelling scout while employed as a carpenter for a local theatre company.

The aspiring thespian debuted in Gus Van Sant's 2008 Milk, subsequently appearing in movies like The Host (a science fiction romance curio Twilight author Stephenie Meyer produced), Logan, and Gone Girl. On the small screen, he's renowned for his lead role in the Netflix crime drama Narcos and for portraying The Corinthian in The Sandman. But A Complete Unknown is the 43-year-old's critical breakthrough.

Adapted by Mangold and Jay Cocks from Elijah Wald's 2015 tome, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, And The Night That Split The Sixties, A Complete Unknown charts Dylan's ascent from folk balladeer in countercultural Greenwich Village to rebellious international rock phenom, his music soundtracking the anti-war and civil rights movements. A magnetic Timothée Chalamet – an A-lister since his 'Best Actor' Oscar nomination for 2017's Call Me By Your Name, but best-known as the star of the Hollywood blockbuster Dune – channels Bob Dylan (and produces).

Arriving in New York from Minnesota in 1961, Dylan visits his ailing idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), finds a mentor in the idealistic protest singer/songwriter Pete Seeger (an inspired Edward Norton) and experiences formative relationships with artist/activist Sylvie Russo (an avatar for Suze Rotolo, enacted by Elle Fanning) and the 'Queen Of Folk' Joan Baez (Top Gun: Maverick's Monica Barbaro).

But, as our hipster achieves fame, Dylan feels impeded by the folk community, growing fandom (future 'Dylanologists') and media proclaiming him 'the spokesman of a generation.' Soon, the wayward musician embraces electric instrumentation. A Complete Unknown culminates in a liberating, if controversial, headlining show at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Rhode Island, where, emboldened by his unlikely country ally Johnny Cash to "Make some noise," Dylan plugs in.

He raises the ire of purists – such as a fictionalised Alan Lomax, ethnomusicologist (Norbert Leo Butz) – and the crowd. The film's title is lifted from the chorus in Dylan's anthem Like A Rolling Stone, which launches his album Highway 61 Revisited. The ensemble all sing and play instruments as their characters, Holbrook emulating Cash's bass-baritone.

In fact, Holbrook had previously partnered with the protean Mangold, whom he calls 'Jim' – being cast as villains in both 2017's acclaimed Logan, fulfilling the Wolverine trilogy, and Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny.

"I don't know if we have enough time in the interview, but it's the best working experience," he laughs of their dynamic. "Jim is the most thoughtful, passionate director I've been able to work with. He also has no problem giving you a very intimate note that maybe only you should hear from, like, 50 feet away, and so things become comical. It's funny. People get roasted on set. It's live. It's a lot of energy."

For Holbrook, the key with Mangold is to "come in really just prepared," as the director often shoots impromptu, ensuring performances are "very cinematic". "You have to come in where you are able to be bent and pulled and stretched that way or this way to make it where it's like 'Wow, that really pops.' He has the ability to do that." He adds, "I would make 12 more movies with Jim, if he wants to."

Mangold made a biopic about a young Cash in 2005's Walk The Line with Joaquin Phoenix – but in A Complete Unknown, the legend swaggers more. Still, Holbrook faced a similar dilemma in rendering the gothic Southern rocker, even as he transformed himself physically with prosthetics, contacts, tan and dyed hair. Indeed, Holbrook plays a real person who exists in living memory, and the public has an image, or preconception, of who he is.

"There was the challenge of tarnishing an icon's image in Johnny Cash, getting that wrong, and then also trying to follow up Joaquin Phoenix's performance and being compared to that. Once I quickly got over all that, through the help of Jim, there was 'What do people remember about Johnny Cash?' And I really feel like it was his really thunderous voice that he had. You know, my speaking voice isn't really down in that register!

"So it really was just like this big, deep dive into hollowing out my own self and finding out how I can create such a seamless impression of someone where I don't take them out of the movie – because, at the end of the day, we're just here to celebrate these people's lives."

There's a comic scene in the drama when, leading up to the festival, Dylan, under pressure from organisers to perform on acoustic guitar, symbolically discovers his motorcycle blocked by Cash's car outside a motel. The inebriated rocker moves his ride, bumping two vehicles in the process, and acts as devil's advocate to the apprehensive troubadour, encouraging his own electric freewheelin'. Holbrook revelled in improvising with Chalamet.

"You know, it's that really old question of like 'How do you play drunk?' I was working on some stuff, and I remember Jim coming up to me on the day… I could hear him laughing in the director's tent – and I know his laugh really well, and I knew that was good.

"But he came up to me, he's like 'You're right on the edge, man, right on the edge.' I knew that that was a good thing and just to be careful where it doesn't become too much. It's that tightrope walk where you're on the tipping point of going over.

"I just was having a blast that day. I mean, I make my best work when I'm really having the best time. You may not see that on my face, that I'm having the best time, but I know that inside."

Word is that Chalamet stayed in character during filming ("I was fully in the Church of Bob," he says in the press kit). Did Holbrook?

"I perfected a couple of monologues and interviews that I'd done verbatim with Johnny and, over a couple of months, I figured out his cadence and all that. So I could switch off from doing some scripted version he had done to having a conversation with my kid and my wife in that sort of rhythm that he has. That was kind of a long, long way of just figuring that out. And, if I found myself going out of that, I would always refer back to those pieces.

"[Cash] was on Pete Seeger's [Rainbow Quest] show, and I'd always go back to that, and I always would keep redefining that, 'cause it kind of creates like an out-of-bounds; like these are the rules of engagement I can hear in my ear – 'cause I've done it so many times that like 'Oh, that's just not the right sound.'"

In A Complete Unknown, Dylan – who, from the outset, cultivates his own mythology – remains inscrutable, observing us as we observe him. The film complements, rather than competes with, earlier Dylan chronicles: Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes' heterodox I'm Not There and Dylan's incomplete memoir Chronicles: Volume One of 2004. Notably, Dylan's longtime manager, Jeff Rosen, is another producer – the "mysterious minstrel", as Russo dubs him, tacitly involved.

Crucially, A Complete Unknown captures how Dylan's amplification at a folk festival became a cultural flashpoint – and an allegory for generational change, something reverberating today. There have since been other schisms in music over technology – musicians' unions attempting to ban synthesisers in the '70s. Even in electronic dance music, the proliferation of laptops and software like Final Scratch polarised traditional vinyl DJs from 2001, while hip-hop and R&B heads are still divided over Auto-Tune.

"It's really interesting how technology really is innovating in music – in any art form, really," Holbrook observes. "In the era A Complete Unknown is diving into, radio is pumping out these songs, and people are getting them in their cars that are becoming muscle cars, and they're on TV now, and there's colour TV – and it's just really magnifying the sound and more people are getting these."

He suggests that, beyond his outlaw persona, Cash, too, was inventive. "He put paper in the top of his neck of his guitar, and it sounds a lot like a drum rattle – because they didn't have a drummer at one point. I mean, that's a really, really minimal way of maximising sound without having a lot of technology. I think it was really innovative at the time."

However, Holbrook admits to experiencing unease himself over technological developments. "Gosh, there's so many, aren't there?" he ponders. "It's just happening so fast that you can barely keep up with [it]. But I find that with AI and Auto-Tune – some person auto-corrected my voice for a podcast to make it go up and down better, and it just doesn't even sound like me.

"I think there's an authenticity that the human ear just resonates with; [something] that is either synthesised or artificial that doesn't feel natural. And that's just like a primordial ancient knowledge that we have; [if] just something's not right or right. So, yeah, I think there's nothing better than just a one-on-one performance or a concert."

A Complete Unknown will premiere in Australian cinemas on Thursday, 23 January.