One of rock and roll’s all-time greats has been immortalized in a new feature biopic that’s earning critical acclaim and awards buzz, but how much of the tale being spun on screen is completely true-to-life and how much is embellished?
A Complete Unknown tackles the early years of rock icon Bob Dylan’s career, with Timothee Chalamet taking the lead as a man who has proven enigmatic at various points of his time in the spotlight.
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Director James Mangold has even admitted that he wasn’t looking to let facts get in the way of a good story.
“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 told 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.”
In at least one instance, a name has been changed but the person in the film is very real. The character of Dylan’s love interest Sylvia Russo, played by Elle Fanning, is based on Dylan’s first serious relationship in New York, a woman named Suze Rotolo. Dylan simply asked those in charge of the film to change his now-deceased ex’s name for the movie.
“He just asked me if it could be changed,” Mangold said. “He still has fondness for her. She’s passed on but was an early love in his life before he was Bob Dylan.”
As for whether audiences really changed “Judas” at him when he began using electric guitars rather than the acoustic sound that had made him a top folk music star, it did happen, just not in the location shown in the movie.
“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.”
In that same scene, Dylan’s mentor Pete Seeger attempts to literally cut Dylan off mid-set, feeling like he was disgracing the folk movement. In reality, Seeger was at that show and was disgusted with Dylan, but how far did he really go?
“There was a lot of urban myth that grew up around that moment,” actor Edward Norton, who plays Seeger, told USA Today. “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,” Norton continued, “and her mother Toshi did step in, as the movie shows.
So we are close to reality there.”
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