A Deep Dive Into Johnny Cash Offering Bob Dylan a Bugle in ‘A Complete Unknown’

Occasionally in blockbuster musician biopics, you will see an absurd or inadvertently funny moment that breaks the facade of self-serious homage common in these films—like the “he’s white?!” part from Elvis. There’s a scene near the climax of the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, that I can’t stop thinking about, and it has nothing to do with Timothée Chalamet or really even Dylan. It’s the summer of 1965 outside a motel in Newport, Rhode Island, and Bobby D is feeling the heat over rumors that he’ll be “going electric” for his closing set at Newport Folk Festival. Pete Seeger’s all like, you got the whole (folk) world in your hands, don’t mess this up for us, kid, but Dylan’s been recording Highway 61 Revisited with rock musicians and can’t resist the thrill of amplification. Still, he’s feeling a little torn.

Enter: a drunk Johnny Cash, Dylan’s onetime pen pal. I read the scene as quiet encouragement from Johnny to Bob, a tacit nudge to stay true to himself, but really, it’s kind of randomly thrown in. Cash is about to leave town when Dylan asks him for a cigarette; he gives Bob the whole pack, places a bottle of Coca-Cola on the hood of his car, tries to back out of a parking space with his driver’s side door still open, rear-ends the car next to him, then hits another car, hops up, and offers Dylan a Bugle. As in, the super-salty corn chips shaped like a dunce cap, that adults and children alike wear on their fingers before munching them down. To be clear, Cash did not eat the Bugles off his fingers. Dylan—chain-smoking and on the brink of a culture-shifting performance—seems uninterested in trying a Bugle. (The following clip is everything but the Bugles bit.)

It’s one of the only humorous moments in A Complete Unknown, thanks to Boyd Holbrook’s portrayal of Johnny Cash as a gregarious louche with a great tan. Holbrook, best known for his role as a DEA agent on the Netflix series Narcos, is somewhat unrecognizable with a prosthetic nose here. Others have pointed out how good he is at acting drunk in this scene, and his response suggests that he wasn’t trying to play it so baldly comedic. “There’s a line I say in that scene, ‘I took a drive and saw the ocean.’ I really understood the tone of his fucked-up-ness in that line. He’s trying to put much more depth out there,” Holbrook told Variety. “A lot of that was improvised. I drop a Coke bottle, crash into some cars.” But there’s no way the Bugles part was improvised: Holbrook’s holding a vintage Bugles box when he offers one to Chalamet. Reportedly there were actual, presumably fresh, Bugles inside. 

I was a bit shocked to realize the film’s director and screenplay co-writer, James Mangold, also helmed Walk the Line, the beloved 2005 Cash biopic, because these portrayals of the Man in Black seem fundamentally opposed. Mangold toyed with the idea of bringing back Phoenix to reprise the role of Cash in A Complete Unknown, before quickly realizing that Joaquin is a 50-year-old man and that wouldn’t make any sense. "This kind of meta-movie universe stuff… has plagued us enough,” he told Business Insider. Holbrook’s Cash is a cheeky devil in black leather who makes beer-swigging and amphetamine-popping look pretty fun; Joaquin Phoenix’s Cash was brooding to the point of addiction. Two sides of the same coin, sure, but Holbrook’s approach to Johnny Cash is still surprising. 

As you might be able to deduce, this scene is factually incorrect from top to bottom. Cash and his band played Newport in 1964 (also shown in the movie) but not the following year, when Dylan went electric (which only happened after he played an acoustic set earlier in the ‘65 festival). There’s no way he could have been Dylan’s fairy godfather and comedic relief before that pivotal moment. But also? Bugles weren’t widely available in the summer of 1964—the snack food debuted in a few regions that year, the closest one to Rhode Island being Syracuse, New York, and arrived nationally in 1966. 

I emailed one of the film’s publicists seeking comment from Mangold about the scene—no response as of press time. Then I started having thoughts like, Was Johnny Cash an early Bugles influencer? and researching his tour routes circa July 1964, which is how I know this absurd thought experiment went too far. Also a sign of taking the bit too literally: I emailed Elijah Wald, the author of the Dylan book upon which A Complete Unknown is based, for his thoughts on the whole thing. I’m not sure what I was looking for exactly—some letter between Dylan and Cash where Johnny’s like, man, Bob, have you tried that weird new chip?—and neither was Wald when he returned my note, seeing as I already knew Cash wasn’t at Newport in 1965. How do you fact-check the details of a memory that doesn’t exist?

There are greater Dylan mysteries worth unraveling than a Bugles joke in a biopic, and maybe that’s why this one amuses me so. For all the Dylanologists poring over Bob’s references and micro-controversies for the last 60 years, surely none of them have deeply pondered whether he was once offered a corn chip by a country-music hero. Just some food for thought.