“You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand,” Bob Dylan sang on “Ballad of a Thin Man” in 1965, pitying and condemning journalists who know when something is happening, but “don’t know what it is.” As such, A Complete Unknown director James Mangold may be ready to scoff at everything beneath this paragraph: A writer getting lost in notes and facts could miss the story he’s trying to tell with his new movie about young Dylan, which was made with the approval of the mercurial recording artist and Nobel Prize winner.
Of course a fictionalized version of a person’s life is going to take some liberties. But for Bob Dylan, taking liberties is the whole idea. (What’s the name of the movie again?) Separating myth from man is one of Mangold’s major themes: At one point, Elle Fanning’s character, Sylvie Russo, confronts Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan for never talking about his past or even confirming that his real name is Robert Zimmerman. Naturally, Russo herself is only partially real; she’s based on Suze Rotolo, who actually did date Dylan during his rise to fame.
But unlike Todd Haynes in his more fantastical Dylan rumination, I’m Not There, Mangold maintains a realistic style, focusing on Dylan’s evolution from wide-eyed folkie to electrified rock pioneer. As such, it’s not unreasonable to end the film by hitting the internet to see what’s real, and what Mangold made up. Rather than make you waste a whole afternoon (and to do something with all my useless Dylan knowledge), here are all your likely questions answered in one spot.
Did Bob Dylan really sneak into Woody Guthrie’s hospital room in the dead of night and play him “Song to Woody”?
No. But meeting Woody Guthrie was at the top of Dylan’s agenda when he came to New York, so much so that he showed up at the Guthrie home. He later met his idol in New Jersey, at a private home where Guthrie often spent weekends during his illness. That encounter inspired “Song to Woody.” Pete Seeger was not at that meeting, and it seems the only actual harmonica Woody Guthrie gave to Dylan was a metaphorical one.
Was Pete Seeger really put on trial for singing a song?
The timeline is fudged a bit in the film, but Seeger truly was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He did not plead the Fifth Amendment, which would have protected him, and instead refused to cooperate. This led to a contempt of Congress charge and an eventual jury trial. Seeger was found guilty and given a prison sentence, which was later overturned. To say, as Edward Norton does in the film, that he was arrested for singing is maybe a stretch, but his activities as an activist folk singer were what got the government’s attention in the first place—so there’s certainly some logic to it. Years later, Seeger was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Bill Clinton.
How did a man as young as Bob Dylan churn out so many brilliant songs?
This is a question for the ages, and one that puzzles Dylan himself (see the embedded video below). But there’s one thing A Complete Unknown very purposely ignores: Much has been written and said about Dylan’s alleged use of amphetamines at this period of his life. The movie, however, shows no substance use besides alcohol, cigarettes, and, to comic effect, coffee.
Is there anything else major the movie leaves out?
For many, and this may include Bob Dylan, a little friendly competition can be a great motivator. A Complete Unknown does a good job of inserting folk-revival Easter eggs into the frame; look sharp, and you’ll see actors meant to represent Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, and Paul Stookey from Peter, Paul, and Mary. But one very important person, Phil Ochs, is absent from Mangold’s film.
Ochs was perhaps the most influential “finger-pointing” activist folk artist of the era, who maintained a serious love-hate relationship with Dylan. The two admired one another, but later clashed as Dylan’s work became less political. Many believe Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” is essentially a diss track against Ochs. Though we’ll never know for sure, Ochs did do a weird cover version of it, and later name-dropped his admiration of, specifically, “the young Bobby Dylan,” during a talk-up on a live album.
There’s a lot happening in A Complete Unknown, and Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger character is enough to represent “the purity of the folk scene” trying to hold Dylan back. As a wink, though, we do see Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez singing Phil Ochs’s gorgeous song “There but for Fortune” at Newport. Baez did have this song in her repertoire, but it does not look like she actually played it there. As such, this is a nice li’l nod to Ochs by James Mangold.
What’s the deal with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan?
Obviously, Joan Baez is a real person, and she really was a huge star on the folk scene when Dylan began his climb. Her presentation of Dylan’s early music did a lot to prep the runway for his arrival, as did Peter, Paul, and Mary, who get very brief shout-outs in A Complete Unknown. (The movie makes it seem like all folkies immediately embraced Dylan. This isn’t exactly true. One eyewitness to history, my mother, likes to talk about seeing Joan Baez in Boston in the early 1960s, eager to hear her “clear as a bell” vocal style. When some weird kid who sounded like a frog came out, many jeered, and Baez jokingly scolded the crowd to say, “he’s gonna be big one day.”) Baez and Dylan did have romantic entanglements in those early days, and she joined Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975. Also, in the late 1980s the two shared a bill on several dates, but it didn’t go so well.
