Mastering Git - Crafting History With Rebase

I believe you both need to be on a branch (not a detached head state), and can only provide the base commit with the other commit being the current HEAD commit.

While it theoretically could work with the range, you’d end up in a detached head state pointing to the new commit(s) created via the rebase. Git seems to enforce already having a branch to point at the new commits.