Bob Dylan super-fans may have already read up on the visionary talent’s background and personal life long before catching the Christmas Day release of his biopic A Complete Unknown. For the average fan, however, it may be difficult to parse through the narrative and leave the theater with a full understanding of which parts are literal interpretations of the multi-talented recording artist’s life and which parts were exaggerated. This is especially true of an enigmatic talent like Bob Dylan, who has built his career off of a blurred attachment to the truth. As seen within the film, the budding talent refused to even confirm his government name during the early years of his career, nor confront his past while building his brand. If you’re among those looking for answers, consider this a comprehensive breakdown of A Complete Unknown, allowing us to separate fact from fiction.
What Is Dead-on Accurate in ‘A Complete Unknown’?
Like many music biopics, A Complete Unknown showcases a wide array of known celebrities who collaborated with Dylan over the years, as well as those who impacted the artist within his personal life. Fans may be pleased to know that two of the major relationships at the center of the film are very accurate to the singer’s real-life – Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo. Baez is already a well-known name to folk music fans across the globe, as she was one of the most prominent voices in the genre during the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. Just like in the film, Baez did meet Bob Dylan during the early years of his career and quickly co-signed his inventive new sound before collaborating closely with him on his third album and beyond. The two really did engage in a romantic fling while Dylan was in a committed relationship, and had significant personal and professional disagreements regarding Dylan’s use of electric instrumentation in his work.
The character of Sylvie Russo is central to A Complete Unknown‘s plot as well, as the young woman served as Bob Dylan’s long-time girlfriend and muse. Though the character doesn’t share a name with the real-life woman, Suze Rotolo, she does serve as a 1:1 stand-in for the actual artist, as evidenced by numerous scenes in the film. Just like the character of Russo, Rotolo really did work with the Congress of Racial Equality during the early 1960s, met Bob Dylan during one of his first concert performances, and heavily inspired his decision to make music about political topics including the threat of nuclear war. Both Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo have been open about their relationship struggles during that time, resulting in scenes that depict real arguments within the movie. Perhaps most notably, the pair engages in the photoshoot for the cover of Dylan’s second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan during the events of A Complete Unknown. The actual cover depicts Dylan and Rotolo walking through the West Village, where they shared an apartment at the time.
What Does the Film Exaggerate?
Obviously, creative liberties need to be taken to condense the origin of an artist of the magnitude of Bob Dylan into a 140-minute narrative. Some instances of exaggeration within A Complete Unknown include Dylan’s initial meeting with Woody Guthrie, the House Un-American Acts trial of Pete Seeger and the spectacle of Dylan’s 1965 set at the Newport Folk Festival. In the film, Dylan meets an ailing Guthrie in a hospital room and performs some of his early demos to him such as “Song to Woody.” In truth, the “Time They Are a-Changin'” singer actually met with his idol shortly after moving to New York, while Guthrie was laid up in a private New Jersey residence. According to those with inside information, Pete Seeger was not in the room when the pair met and Guthrie had no actual gifts – harmonica or otherwise – to hand off to the emerging folk talent.
As for Seeger’s trial, the film greatly exaggerates a few details, but the singer-songwriter did face a House Un-American Acts trial in 1955 before eventually being sentenced to prison time for his failure to cooperate with investigations into communism within the folk scene. Seeger, as portrayed by Edward Norton in the biopic, argues that he is being persecuted for his musical output, though in reality his trial was largely driven by his work as an activist. Luckily, Seeger’s prison sentence was eventually overturned and he has since received high honors from both the government and the general public for his anti-war sentiments.
Finally, the big climactic scene in which a festival patron declares Bob Dylan to be “Judas” seems to be an amalgamation of two separate real-life stories. Dylan really did shatter cultural norms and expectations of folk audiences by performing with electric instruments at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival, causing a major divide between himself and many of his peers. Many old-school audience members may not have been on board with the performance, but those who attended overwhelmingly hailed the set as a success according to eyewitnesses and archive footage. Those responsible for crafting A Complete Unknown seem to have truncated a story of a heckler shouting “Judas” from a real event in 1966 when Dylan brought his electric set to a tour overseas. As seen in a YouTube video, Dylan and his band are performing the intro instrumentation for the track “Like a Rolling Stone” when one patron shouts the biblical insult, to which Dylan responds “I don’t believe you, you’re a liar” before turning to his band and instructing them to “Play it f***ing loud.”
What Parts of ‘A Complete Unknown’ Are an Outright Fabrication?
While most of the film seems quite faithful to Bob Dylan’s real life, A Complete Unknown is not immune to the pitfalls of Hollywood storytelling. Some aspects of the biopic, including a few characters, performances and interactions, are entirely false and exist only to create a concise story. For instance, the film depicts Dylan in a brief romantic relationship with a British woman named Becka, who may simply be an amalgamation of multiple women condensed into one character. As far as any major Dylan super-fan can surmise, no such individual woman ever existed in this capacity. Similarly, the character of Jesse Moffett, portrayed by Big Bill Morganfield, does not exist in the real world and was likely written to truncate Dylan’s experiences with a myriad of blues players throughout his life.
One of the biggest fabrications in A Complete Unknown seems to be the relationship shared by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. While the two legends had met and conversed many times during their storied careers, Cash is used as something of an angel on Dylan’s shoulder throughout the film, encouraging the folk singer to push his artistic expression further and further, even if it means stepping on the toes of the established folk hierarchy. One pivotal scene in the sees Dylan looking for reassurance ahead of his controversial 1965 Folk Festival performance. In the film, Johnny Cash offers the budding superstar a career-saving pep talk while munching on a bag of Bugles (a snack that wouldn’t have existed at the time) and encourages him to follow his heart. In truth, Cash was not present at the Newport, Rhode Island event as he was not scheduled to perform that year.
Though there’s nothing in the film to suggest as such, it may be worth rewatching A Complete Unknown while imagining Johnny Cash as something of an ethereal, force-ghost type of figure. His larger-than-life status lends itself to this interpretation and also makes the film a bit more accurate to Bob Dylan’s life. Maybe Dylan gave himself the pep talk while imagining, “What would Johnny Cash do?” Maybe he even enlisted a trusted personal friend, not represented in the film, to provide the talk for him, sans Bugles. Either way, it makes the narrative of A Complete Unknown much more impactful to think of the fateful performance as a sanctioned passing of the torch from one legend to another.
