The Bob Dylan biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a remarkable telling of the rise to fame of the legendary Bob Dylan but like all movies based on real life, liberties were taken to fit the story into one two-hour and 20-minute capsule.
The movie, based on the 2015 book at Elijah Wald ‘Dylan Goes Electric’, portrays Dylan meeting his heroes Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie at the same time in Woody’s hospital room. While that is how Dylan met Guthrie, he was already acquainted previously with Seeger through New York folk clubs.
Another fictitious scene is when Bob turns up late for Pete Seeger’s TV show while bluesman Big Bill Morganfield is on. That never happened and the three of them never played together.
It is also doubtful that Dylan ever stayed at Seeger’s house on the couch when he first came to New York. Wald has stated that by making Bob and Pete the two main characters in the story that he had to invent circumstances that would place them together in the same room to tell the story.
Dylan’s girlfriend at the time Suze Rotolo has had her name changed to Sylvie Russo. It has been suggested that was to protect her family identity but as Rotolo is the woman on the cover of Bob’s ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ album, was an artist in her own rite back in the day and contributed to Martin Scorsese’s ‘No Direction Home’ Dylan movie on camera and with her real name, that makes no sense.
The movie does accurately portray that Suze/Sylvie was the one who inspired Bob to write political songs. The real Suze also did not attend the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. She and Dylan had long split before then. Dylan was already going with Sara Lownds at the time. Sara married Bob not long after Newport. She is the mother of Jakob Dylan (The Wallflowers). Sara is not mentioned at all in ‘A Complete Unknown’. Sara and Bob were together for 10 years. She inspired much of his music in that time. Dylan’s 1975 album ‘Blood On The Tracks’ is an account of their divorce.
The ‘Dylan Goes Electric’ controversy at the Newport Folk Festival is also a publicity beat-up. The story goes (and is portrayed in the movie) that Dylan fans went nuts and called him ‘Judas’ when Bob played an electric guitar at the folk festival. That actually happened earlier at a concert in England.
Shortly before his death in an interview about 10 years ago, Pete Seeger said that he was telling the soundguy to fix Bob’s distorted vocals, not telling him to turn him off. Seeger said he most definitely did not look for an axe to break the cables, as shown in the movie. Also, Howling Wolf played an electric guitar the day before and no-one cared, so it made no sense the same audience would be outraged by electric Bob.
In the scene where Dylan follows Joan Baez in a nightclub, it has never been documented that Dylan and Baez ever performed back-to-back in New York at the time. Also, they did not meet inside the nightclub. Joan has stated that she met Bob outside Gerde’s Folk City in 1961. According to Joan, Dylan seemed more interested in her sister Mimi at that first meeting.
Dylan meeting a drunken Johnny Cash for the first time at Newport in 1965 is also false. In Cash’s eulogy he said they first met in 1963. Cash didn’t even play at Newport in 1965.
‘A Complete Unknown’ is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book ‘Dylan Goes Electric’. Overall it is a wonderful telling of the inner workings of Dylan’s kind in those early days.
‘A Complete Unknown’ adjust timelines and storylines to fit the overall story into the limited available time the movies allows for. Unlike the blatant lies told in the Queen movie ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Elton John ‘Rocketman’, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a more authentic telling of the Dylan story with poetic license used to condense the story.
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