(Credits: Searchlight Pictures)
Bob Dylan is a notoriously cagey person. Known for muddying the waters of his own mythology at every opportunity, making an accurate biopic about him was presumably extremely challenging. James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown follows the musician’s life between his arrival in New York in 1961 and the controversy surrounding his decision to go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and the level of input from its central figure has been a heated topic of debate in the months leading up to its release.
Starring Timothée Chalamet as the recalcitrant musician, the film has quickly earned glowing reviews and awards nominations, teeing it up to be a major player at the Oscars next year. Given his penchant for being both elusive and meddlesome in his approach to his own celebrity, Dylan could have been a thorn in the side of the filmmakers, but it turns out that he contributed only a few alterations.
The main source of tension throughout the film is his troubled relationships with two women, fellow musician Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) and artist Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning). Sylvie is a fictionalised name for Dylan’s former partner, Suze Rotolo, who he met when he first moved to New York. According to Dylan, it was important that the late Rotolo, who was a much more private person than Baez or even Dylan himself, retain some level of anonymity, even if his fans would instantly recognise who the character was.
That wasn’t Dylan’s only request relating to Rotolo. Although her character arc is remarkably similar to real life, Fanning revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone that the musician added a line to a scene in which he and Sylvie are fighting.
“It was something like, ‘Don’t even bother coming back,’” she recalled. “We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something — or regretting something that he said to her.”
The movie doesn’t gloss over the cruelty and complexity of Dylan’s relationship with both Rotolo and Baez. In the scene in question, Sylvie expresses her discomfort with the thought of living “with a mysterious minstrel” once she returns from an extended trip to Europe, only for Dylan to shoot back, “Mysterious minstrels sell more than a thousand records. Maybe you just don’t come back at all.”
While it’s not clear whether these were the only changes that Dylan made to the script, it is clear that he felt a certain level of responsibility to do justice to Rotolo rather than simply cast himself as a hero. The artist had a significant influence on his music and even appeared on the cover of his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
His desire to keep their relationship as true to life as possible in the film may have had something to do with his guilt over how he handled it in previous years. Following their breakup in 1964, he wrote the song ‘Ballad in Plain D,’ in which he lays out their history and disintegration with emotional candour and lands several stinging insults on her family. He later admitted that he regretted the song, saying, “I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”
Related Topics