Spoiler alert! We’re discussing the new Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” (in theaters now). If you haven’t seen it, don’t think twice, bookmark our story for later.
What’s fact and what’s fiction in “A Complete Unknown,” the story of Bob Dylan’s first four years of stardom?
The subject himself has proven so slippery with his biography − as a new star, he told reporters he was from New Mexico, not Minnesota, and fibbed about being in a traveling circus − that a small army of Dylan chroniclers have had their hands full trying to lock down the truth.
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But director James Mangold was not making a documentary, and as such felt free to play with events and dates in the early 1960s to keep his movie moving along.
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“You make a biopic and there’s an assumption you’re doing a history lesson with text on the screen labeling things, but I had no interest in that,” Mangold tells USA TODAY. “I wanted to tell the story with the same authority as a fiction film, where the dates don’t matter so much. I kept saying, ‘We’re not doing the Disney Hall of Presidents, where the animatronic president does a famous speech.”
An online search about the facts in “A Complete Unknown” will turn up countless lists of date tweaks, character conflations and outright speculation that Mangold employed in his storytelling. We checked in with the director as well as one of the movie’s stars, Edward Norton (who plays Pete Seeger), to clarify a few particularly salient scenes.
Various accounts of Dylan’s early days in New York suggest that he first met Pete Seeger when the veteran folkie caught the newcomer’s act in Greenwich Village. A mesmerized Seeger quickly kept track of the ingenue.
In “A Complete Unknown,” it’s implied that this first encounter happened when Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) went to visit a sickly Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) at Greystone, a psychiatric facility in New Jersey. Norton feels confident that the two men were both present, perhaps on numerous occasions, at Guthrie’s bedside, since Seeger was a close friend of the “This Land Is Your Land” composer and Dylan visited often.
The movie “compressed some things, but Pete was Woody’s longest road buddy, so if Pete and Bob didn’t meet there first, they certainly were there together,” says Norton. As for whether Dylan actually sang his composition “Song to Woody” to Guthrie, Norton says “it was his first composition, so I don’t think there’s any doubt he would have played it for him.”
Bob Dylan’s first serious New York love was Suze Rotolo, a politically active young woman who greatly influenced the musician. Rotolo famously is the woman walking arm in arm with Dylan down a frozen Greenwich Village street on the cover of his second album, 1963’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
In Dylan’s autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One,” the singer recalled their first meeting: “Right from the start, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian.”
In “A Complete Unknown,” Rotolo’s character has been renamed Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). The request was made by Dylan himself. “He just asked me if it could be changed,” says Mangold. “He still has fondness for her. She’s passed on, but was an early love in his life before he was Bob Dylan.”
Dylan pivoted away from folk music as the mid-’60s approached, eager to be in a band and take part in the electric music revolution. This decision angered fans who felt he was a traitor to their cause. Some took to yelling “Judas!” during concerts.
In “A Complete Unknown,” those shouts take place during his raucous 1965 Newport Folk Festival show, known as the moment “Dylan went electric.” But as D.A Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Don’t Look Back” depicts, those cries are more associated with British fans during a 1965 tour of England.
“He auditioned his electric stuff first overseas, which prompted the ‘Judas’ stuff,” says Mangold. “But I moved it to Newport because I couldn’t subject the audience to it twice. And the point of the scene is, he’s coming out as a rocker in the backyard of the people who made him a folk superstar.”
There’s no question that Seeger, a longtime champion of Dylan’s folkie talent, was disappointed when the star defied Newport Folk Festival programmers by playing a loud if short set with electric instruments.
But did he look for an ax to cut the sound cables?
“There was a lot of urban myth that grew up around that moment,” says Norton. “I spoke with Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary), who was there, and Pete’s oldest daughter, who was 17 and standing there. He didn’t grab an ax and try and cut the cord, and there were people who thought he said, ‘If I had an ax, I’d cut the cable.’ His daughter said she’d never seen him that angry in his life, and her mother Toshi did step in, as the movie shows.
“So we are close to reality there.”
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