Midway through the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan has an angry confrontation with his girlfriend, Sylvia Russo, about why he never makes any reference to his past. “People make up their past, Sylvie!” he roars. “They remember what they want. They forget the rest.”
Dylan has been making up his own past ever since he told the press in 1961 that he came from Gallup, New Mexico, and joined up with a traveling carnival at age 13, working as a “clean-up boy” and a Ferris wheel operator. Dylan scholars like Anthony Scaduto, Clinton Heylin, Robert Shelton, David Hajdu, and Howard Sounes worked tirelessly to separate fact from fiction over the decades, but it’s never been an any easy task, especially since Dylan’s 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One is packed with more than a few questionable assertions, to put it charitably.
A Complete Unknown is loosely based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, and the screenplay was co-written by longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks. These are two guys with a deep breadth of knowledge about Dylan and his past. In 1964, when he was a student at Kenyon College, Cocks even spent the day with Dylan and wrote about the experience for The Kenyon Collegian.
But this is a Hollywood biopic that attempts to cram a very intense four-year period of history into a two-hour-and-21-minute movie. The filmmakers had little choice but to compress the timeline, eliminate major characters, and favor emotional truth over strict historical truth.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Movies aren’t books or documentaries. You don’t turn to them to learn how the past unfolded in perfect order. And to be clear, A Complete Unknown is a stellar film: Dylan newbies and longtime fans alike should enjoy it. Timothée Chalamet is likely to be nominated for an Academy Award for his stunning portrayal of Bob Dylan, and Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, and Monica Barbaro are all brilliant in their supporting roles.
Editor’s picks
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, we encourage you to hold off on reading this article — it is packed with spoilers. If you have seen it, read ahead to see where the movie veers away from the historical record. (We’ve done this in the past with films about Queen, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Mötley Crüe, and the Sex Pistols.)
1. Dylan didn’t arrive in New York alone.
A Complete Unknown begins in January 1961, when Dylan arrives in New York City at the height of an historically frigid winter. He’s shown leaving the car on his own and venturing down to Greenwich Village, but he was actually with buddy Fred Underhill on the ride, and throughout that fabled first week. Underhill has been removed from the story in A Complete Unknown.
2. Dylan didn’t meet Woody Guthrie for the first time at a psychiatric hospital.
As the movie shows, Dylan’s first objective upon arriving in New York City was to meet Woody Guthrie. In the film, an unnamed bearded fellow at a bar, clearly meant to be Dave Van Ronk, tells him that Guthrie is at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey. Dylan takes a taxi and meets the ailing singer at his bedside. In reality, Dylan first attempted to contact Guthrie at his family’s home in Howard Beach, Queens, where he met his two young children, Nora and Arlo. Dylan met their father days later at the home of Bob and Sidsel Gleason in East Orange, New Jersey, where Guthrie spent many of his weekends.
3. Dylan didn’t first encounter Pete Seeger at Guthrie’s bedside.
Pete Seeger (played by Ed Norton) is a major figure in A Complete Unknown. In the movie, he’s sitting with Guthrie at Greystone when Dylan visits him for the first time. This is inaccurate. In an unpublished portion of a 2007 interview with Rolling Stone, Seeger recalled his actual first meeting with Dylan. “It was down in Greenwich Village,” he said. “I knew a lot of people down there. They said, ‘You gotta hear this guy.’ I heard him once and I asked him to be at a Hootenanny at Carnegie Hall. I remember sitting down on a long table with a bunch of other people who were going to be on. I said, ‘Folks, we all only have time to sing three short songs because we all have about 10 minutes apiece.’ And this skinny guy raises his hand with a wry smile. He says, ‘Well, one of my songs takes 10 minutes.’ I think it was ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’ What a song.”
Related Content
4. Dylan didn’t sing “Song to Woody” to Guthrie at their first meeting.
Guthrie was deep into his battle with Huntington’s disease when he met Dylan in 1961, and barely able to speak. In the movie, he motions for Dylan to play a song on the guitar. The young singer responds by playing “Song to Woody.” This is indeed one of Dylan’s earliest original compositions, but he hadn’t written it prior to that first meeting. He was actually inspired to write the song by the time they spent together in New Jersey throughout early 1961.
5. Dylan didn’t crash at Seeger’s house.
Dylan was essentially homeless when he arrived in New York. He couch-surfed throughout his early months, often staying with married couples Bob and Sidsel Gleason, Dave Van Ronk and Terri Thal, and Eve and Mac McKenzie. “He would sometimes stay two nights consecutively, but rarely more than that,” Van Ronk told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes. “Bob was a very accomplished schnorrer, a Yiddish term — somebody who mooches for a living. And a very smart schnorrer never wears out his welcome.” In A Complete Unknown, Dylan spends the night at the Seeger’s family home in Beacon, New York, after meeting him in Guthrie’s hospital room. This didn’t happen.
6. Dylan wasn’t writing “Girl From the North Country” in 1961.
Movie Dylan plays the opening segment of “Girl From the North Country” to Pete Seeger and his family while staying at their house after his initial meeting with Woody Guthrie. This takes place in early 1961, but Dylan didn’t actually write the song until late in 1962, after he returned from a trip to England.
7. Dylan’s first meeting with Joan Baez didn’t happen quite like that.
Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) first enters the movie when we see her perform “House of the Rising Sun” at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. Seeger introduces Dylan to the audience following her set, and she’s stunned by his performance of “I Was Young When I Left Home.” Dylan and Baez did meet at Gerde’s, but it wasn’t a chance encounter like the movie presents. She went there specifically to see him.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta come down and hear this guy, he’s terrific,’” Baez told Rolling Stone in 1983. “And so I went down with my very, very jealous boyfriend, and we saw this scruffy little pale-faced dirty human being get up in front of the crowd and start singing his ‘Song to Woody.’ I, of course, internally went completely to shreds, ’cause it was so beautiful. But I couldn’t say anything, ’cause I was next to my very, very jealous boyfriend, who was watching me out of the corner of his eye and trying to mentally slaughter Dylan, I think. And then Bob came over and said, ‘Uhhh, hi’ — one of those eloquent greetings — and I just thought he was brilliant and superb and so on.”
8. Albert Grossman wasn’t Dylan’s first manager.
In the movie, Albert Grossman is at Gerde’s the same night that Dylan meets Baez. He sees huge potential in Dylan, becomes his manager, and arranges an audition with Columbia Records. The scene takes place in early 1961, since Seeger tells the audience he met Dylan just four weeks earlier, but Grossman wouldn’t become Dylan’s manager until 1962. Prior to that, Dylan was managed for brief periods by Terry Thal and Kevin Krown. They’ve all been erased from the story in A Complete Unknown.
9. Dylan cut his first album two months after Robert Shelton wrote about him in the New York Times.
Right after movie Dylan meets Baez at Gerde’s, he’s whisked to Columbia Records by Grossman to meet John Hammond and record his first album. In the elevator on their way up to the offices, Grossman is holding an article Robert Shelton wrote in the September 29, 1961, edition of The New York Times that called him a “bright new face.” It is indeed true that Dylan went to Columbia for a recording session with Hammond the day that article hit stands. But he was there to play harmonica on a Carolyn Hester song that Hammond was producing. Dylan didn’t record his own album for another two months.
10. Dylan never dated a woman named Sylvie Russo.
Nearly every character goes by their actual name in A Complete Unknown. The only exception is Dylan’s early girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who appears arm-in-arm with him on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. At the request of Dylan himself, her name was changed to Sylvie Russo in the movie. She’s played by Elle Fanning. And since she’s Rotolo in everything but name, even posing with him on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, we’re going to fact-check her scenes as if she’s indeed her real-life counterpart. The movie accurately shows them meeting at a Riverside Church Folk concert, and correctly notes that she worked for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and inspired him to write political songs.
11. Suze/Sylvie went to Europe for much longer than 12 weeks.
Suze Rotolo left Dylan and New York behind for six months in the summer of 1962 to study art at the University of Perugia in Italy. This left Dylan shattered. You can hear his pain in songs like “Boots of Spanish Leather.” In the movie, Sylvie heads to Italy for a mere 12 weeks.
12. Dylan and Baez never hooked up on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The second time Baez encounters Dylan in A Complete Unknown is the evening of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the city is in a state of panic about a possible nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. (It should be noted that people were very panicky at the height of the crisis, but the movie shows New Yorkers fleeing the city like a comet is about to strike. This is a gross exaggeration.) Baez stumbles into a coffeehouse and sees him performing “Masters of War.” They meet up, make out in the doorway, and head back to Dylan’s apartment. In reality, Dylan was more fixated on Baez’s younger sister Mimi when they met for the second time. Dylan and Baez did indeed have a brief romance, but it didn’t start until much later.
13. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was written several months earlier than shown.
The morning after their Cuban Missile Crisis hookup, movie Joan finds a draft of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in Dylan’s typewriter. She encourages him to play it for her, and they wind up singing it together. This scene takes place in October 1962. In reality, he’d been playing the song at Village coffeehouses since at least April 1962. It was published in a May 1962 issue of Broadside, and a June 1962 issue of Sing Out!. Dylan recorded it in July 1962. By October of that year, it wouldn’t have been new to Baez or anyone on the folk scene.
14. Dylan and Baez didn’t sing “Girl From the North Country” at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival.
As the movie shows, Dylan traveled to California in May 1963 to perform at the Monterey Folk Festival. But the song Dylan played with Baez during his brief set was “With God on Our Side.” In the movie, they perform “Girl From the North Country.” There’s no record of them performing that song together at any point.
15. Dylan did not play “The Times They Are A-Changin’” at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.
In A Complete Unknown, Dylan plays “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to a rapturous crowd at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. At the actual event, he played “All I Really Wanna Do,” “To Ramona,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Chimes of Freedom” before bringing out Joan Baez for “With God on Our Side.” He never played “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
16. Johnny Cash didn’t perform right before Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.
Johnny Cash was on the bill of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. He played right before Joan Baez on Friday, July 24th. Bob Dylan’s main set took place two days later on Sunday, July 26th. In A Complete Unknown, it’s all compressed into a single evening.
17. “Like a Rolling Stone” was recorded prior to “Highway 61 Revisited,” not the other way around.
“Like a Rolling Stone was” recorded in June 1965. “Highway 61 Revisited” was recorded in August 1965. A Complete Unknown shows the “Highway 61 Revisited” session taking place some time prior to “Like a Rolling Stone.” The movie ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. At that point, he had yet to record “Highway 61 Revisited.”
18. Tom Wilson didn’t produce “Highway 61 Revisited.”
For reasons that have never been fully explained, Dylan parted ways with longtime producer Tom Wilson after the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone.” Bob Johnston produced the rest of Highway 61 Revisited, including the title track. In the movie, Wilson is still behind the board for “Highway 61 Revisited.”
19. Dylan didn’t bring the police whistle to the Highway 61 Revisited sessions.
In the official Highway 61 Revisited credits, Dylan is credited with playing the guitar, harmonica, piano, and the “police car.” The latter is due to a police whistle Dylan plays throughout the title track. In A Complete Unknown, Dylan buys the police whistle from a street merchant on the way to the session on a mere whim. In reality, organist Al Kooper brought in the whistle. “At the time, I wore that police whistle around my neck like a necklace,” Kooper told Rolling Stone. “I would use it in certain situations, mostly relating to drugs — my sense of humor at the time. When we were recording the song, it just sounded great to me. I took the necklace and put it around Bob’s neck and said, ‘Play this instead of the harmonica.’ And there you go. And I think he kept it, damn it.”
20. Dylan never crashed Pete Seeger’s TV show.
Ed Norton deserves an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Pete Seeger, but the movie wildly overstates the role he played in Dylan’s life and career. Near the end of the movie, we see Seeger hosting Rainbow Quest. This was a real-life program in New York and New Jersey that Seeger used to showcase folk, blues, and bluegrass musicians. His special guest this episode is a Delta Blues singer named Jesse Moffette, played by blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield. Dylan shows up midway through the taping and performs a song with Moffette. But there was no Moffette, and Dylan never appeared on the show.
21. Dylan and Baez didn’t get into a fight onstage over the setlist.
In March and April of 1965, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez played theaters together across the East Coast. None of the shows were captured by bootleggers, and little is known about what they actually played together beyond newspaper accounts and hazy memories from fans. In A Complete Unknown, they play “All I Really Want to Do” before Dylan stops the song short. She attempts to carry on with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but Dylan refuses. “I don’t believe the setlist was advertised,” he snarls. “This isn’t a request-type concert. If you wanna hear that, go see Donovan.” He then storms off the stage, and she finishes the show by herself. This tour certainly came at a very rocky time in their relationship and Dylan indeed had no interest in singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” by then, but the onstage spat is a fiction.
22. Bob Neuwirth didn’t enter Dylan’s life in 1965.
Bob Dylan met folk singer Bob Neuwirth in 1961 at the Indian Neck Folk Festival held in Branford, Connecticut. They became close friends, and Neuwirth was later hired as his road manager. They were joined at the hip throughout Dylan’s amphetamine-fueled mid-Sixties period. In A Complete Unknown, they meet randomly in an elevator following a stuffy Manhattan party in 1965. (Victor Maymudes was another close member of Dylan’s entourage in this period, but he’s not portrayed in A Complete Unknown, possibly because their relationship ended with a very messy legal spat in the late-Nineties.)
23. Suze/Sylvie didn’t attend the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with Dylan.
By the time of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan was living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York with future wife Sara Lownds, and she was pregnant with their son Jesse. He was no longer romantically involved with Joan Baez, and Suze Rotolo was largely the sad memory of a love he lost. In A Complete Unknown, he pulls up to Sylvie’s apartment prior to Newport and invites her to tag along with him on his motorcycle. This didn’t happen. He drove there in a car with friends.
24. Johnny Cash was never at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Two decades ago, James Mangold directed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line starring Joaquin Phoenix as the Man in Black. We meet a slightly younger Cash (played by Boyd Holbrook) at the height of his drug addiction period in A Complete Unknown. He repeatedly encourages Dylan to ignore the doubters and forge his own path. The character is present throughout the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but he wasn’t there in real life.
25. Dylan and Baez didn’t perform together at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
There’s no mention of the April/May1965 Don’t Look Back tour of England in A Complete Unknown, but it marked the bitter end of Dylan’s relationship with Joan Baez. She tagged along for the early dates, but he didn’t invite her onstage a single time. She left halfway through. When Newport came around two months later, they were barely on speaking terms. The movie shows them playing “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind” together at Newport 1965. But they didn’t sing a note together at Newport that year. The “It Ain’t Me, Babe” duet took place at Newport 1964. At the 1965 Newport, she sang with Donovan.
26. Dylan played two acoustic songs at Newport following his electric set.
We’re going to go light on the depiction of Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival since it’s hard to separate myth from fact surrounding the event. The fistfight between Albert Grossman and festival board member Alan Lomax in the movie has been reported as an actual event. And Pete Seeger was definitely horrified by the volume of the performance. He said many times over the years it was bothering his father Charles, though accounts of him trying to take an axe to the cables simply aren’t true.
The experience from the audience was a true Rashomon event. Some fans say folk purists were booing because Dylan was playing electric, while others say the ruckus was merely over the distorted sound. And others say they happily sang along since “Like a Rolling Stone” was a hot new single. What can’t be disputed is that Dylan was drawn back onstage after three electric songs to play acoustic renditions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The movie only shows him doing the latter song.
27. The infamous “Judas!” moment happened in England, not at Newport.
According to Ed Norton, Bob Dylan insisted that James Mangold include a wildly inaccurate scene in A Complete Unknown. We don’t know for sure, but it’s very possible the scene in question comes during the Newport sequence near the end of the film when an enraged fan screams out “Judas!” and Dylan responds, “I don’t believe you…Play loud.” That legendary moment actually took place May 17, 1966, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England.
