A Complete Unknown is now available to buy and rent on digital platforms, which means audiences who didn’t catch the Bob Dylan movie in theaters now have a chance to catch up before the 2025 Oscars.
Directed by James Mangold (Ford v. Ferrari, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), who also co-wrote the script with Jay Cocks, A Complete Unknown has earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Chalamet), Best Supporting Actor (Edward Norton), and Best Supporting Actress (Monica Barbaro). And right now, Chalamet is the favorite to take home an Academy Award on Sunday. If you care about the Oscars, you definitely don’t want to miss this movie.
But after you watch A Complete Unknown, you’ll no doubt find yourself wondering: Just how true is this true story, exactly? How accurate is Chalamet’s version of Bob Dylan to the real Bob Dylan?
You’ve come to the right place to find out. Read on for a breakdown of A Complete Unknown true story, and how accurate A Complete Unknown is to the real Bob Dylan.
A Complete Unknown is based on the true story of legendary folk singer, Bob Dylan (played by Chalamet), during his early, breakthrough years in New York City in the 1960s, and concludes in 1965, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival and made the controversial decision to play with an electric, amplified band, despite protests from the festival’s committee.
Like almost every Hollywood movie based on a true story, A Complete Unknown made changes to the real story in order to create a more efficient, compelling movie. Let’s get into the things A Complete Unknown got right, and wrong.
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger:
As shown in the movie, Bob Dylan, who was born Robert Zimmerman, moved to New York City in 1961 to visit Woody Guthrie when he was 19 years old. Guthrie had Huntington’s disease and was hospitalized from 1956 until his death in 1967. It’s also true that Dylan wrote a song for Guthrie, “Song to Woody,” which he released on his debut 1962 album. While there is no clear documentation of Dylan playing the song to Guthrie, biographer Elijah Wald who wrote the book that the movie is based on (Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties) confirmed in a recent interview with Time that Dylan did visit Guthrie in the hospital more than once. It’s reasonable to assume one of those visits included Dylan sharing his song.
However, the relationship between folk singer Pete Seeger and Dylan was greatly exaggerated for the movie. In the movie, Seeger (played by Edward Norton), is the room when a young Dylan firsts visits Guthrie. Movie Seeger lets Dylan stay at his home, and acts as his mentor, getting him shows and introducing him to Joan Baez. In reality, its unclear if Seeger and Dylan even crossed paths in Guthrie’s hospital room. That said, Seeger was good friends with Guthrie, so it’s possible. But though Dylan has credited Seeger as an influence, and though they were acquaintances, the real Seeger did not mentor or house a teenaged Bob Dylan. In real life, Dylan’s father-figure esque mentor was folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
Sylvia Russo/Suze Rotolo:
Per the real Bob Dylan’s request, A Complete Unknown did not use the real name of his former girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who appeared on the cover of Dylan’s acclaimed album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Instead, the character is named Sylvia Russo (played by Elle Fanning). However, Sylvia is quite clearly modeled after Rotolo: Both were activists and artists. (They even work for the same cause, the Congress for Racial Equality, or CORE). As you see the movie, the real Dylan and Rotolo met in 1961 at a Riverside Church folk concert, according to her New York Times obituary.
Dylan and Rotolo broke up in 1964, and there is no evidence that Rotolo joined Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, as you see the in the film. But it’s nice to have closure in the movie version, right?
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Joan Baez:
In the movie, Dylan observes New Yorkers panicking and fleeing the city during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when a U.S. spy plane captured evidence that the Soviet Union was preparing launch facilities for its nuclear weapons based in Cuba. (Rolling Stone notes that while people were worried and stocking up on food, the screaming in streets is a “gross exaggeration.”) In response, Dylan takes is guitar to The Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and plays his famed anti-war song, “Masters of War.” There, a scared Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) finds Dylan playing, and they begin their romantic relationship.
This scene is greatly dramatized, though based in some truth. The real Dylan was quoted on the record sleeve saying that he wrote another anti-war song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, given that he played that song at a concert in September 1962, a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, it seems this is not true. Some theorize Dylan was confusing the song with his still-unreleased song, “Cuban Missile Crisis.” There’s no evidence that Dylan played “Masters of War” on the eve of the crisis, even if it later inspired the song.
While we don’t know the exact details of when Dylan and Baez’s romantic relationship began, but Rolling Stone claims it was “much later” than 1962. There is also no evidence that Dylan walked off stage while on tour with Baez, because he refused to perform “Blowin’ in the Wind.” As far as this reporter can tell, that story is a fabrication. However, he was known to perform drunk or high.
However, one aspect of Baez and Dylan’s relationship—and what seems to have ended their romance— that movie skips over is Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour, when he invited Baez to join him but then neglected to invite her up on stage for any of the shows. “I just sort of trotted around, wondering why Bob wouldn’t invite me onstage, feeling very sorry for myself, getting very neurotic and not having the brains to leave and go home,” Baez told Rolling Stone in 1983. “That would be the best way to describe that tour. It was sort of just wasted time.”
That tour happened just months before the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, which serves as the climax for the movie. But there’s no mention of it in the film.
Johnny Cash:
It’s true that Johnny Cash was a big fan of Dylan, and it’s also true that the two musicians exchanged letters. According to a report from Far Out magazine, Cash recalled sending Dylan fan mail in his autobiography. “After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was,” Cash said in his 2003 book Cash: The Autobiography. “He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line,’ and so we began a correspondence.”
Cash wasn’t mentioned in the Going Electric book. But James Mangold—who also directed the Cash biopic, Walk the Line—decided to include him has a character after he discovered the letters. Boyd Holbrook, who plays Cash in the film, told Entertainment Weekly that Dylan showed Mangold the real letters, and some of the dialogue in the movie are direct quotes.
“I read those and they’re great, man,” Holbrook said. “They’re on the back of airplane sickness bags. These guys are at the pinnacle of their lives, road dogs traveling in the isolation of maximum fame.”
1965 Newport Folk Festival:
It’s true that Dylan performed an electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he was met with boos and jeers (and some cheers) from the rowdy audience. However, in an interview with the New York Times, Going Electric author Elijah Wald said it’s not entirely clear why the audience was booing. Was it because Dylan was playing electric, or because he only played three songs?
“There certainly were people who were upset at him playing electric,” Wald said. “But how many people were booing him for that and how many were booing because he had left the stage is impossible to sort out.” (Dylan eventually did return to stage to play two more acoustic songs, though only one is shown in the film)
The “Judas!” comment from one particularly irate fan did happen, but not at that festival. In reality, it happened a year later, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England in 1966, as you can see in a clip from the 2005 Martin Scorsese-directed Bob Dylan documentary.
It also seems that Seeger and other folk musician’s insistence before the show that Dylan not play electric was exaggerated for the drama. That said, in covering the event, the New York Times reported that Alan Lomax “fumed and hollered, insisting that the volume be turned down, to no avail,” and that Seeger “first threatened to cut the sound cables, then walked out.” This spun into a legend that Seeger threatened to cut Dylan’s sound cables with an axe—a moment that movie winks to.
So there you have it. Even though A Complete Unknown is more or less based in truth, plenty of details were changed in the name of good storytelling. Isn’t that what good folk artists do?