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In James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet fingerpicks the tussle-haired troubadour’s guitar and stands inside Bob Dylan’s shoes. But those bootheels wander through a tangle of folk tales about the ambitious young singer’s life from 1961 to 1965 in New York’s Greenwich Village. During the film, Dylan tells girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a pseudonym for the late Suze Rotolo (seen on the cover of Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album): “People make up their past, Sylvie. They remember what they want. They forget the rest.”
Bob Dylan is a master of making up past histories and self-mythology. In a January 1961 interview with WBAI FM’s “Folksingers Choice,” Dylan claimed to work the ferris wheel at a traveling carnival, starting at age 13. As the movie reiterates, Bob mentions being from Gallup, New Mexico. However, Robert Allen Zimmerman, Dylan’s real name, was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in Hibbing. But in 1961, the southern roots inferred a street-cred musical pedigree. The carnival was probably an allegory to the rock and roll bands Dylan played in, including backing Bobby Vee at two shows. Bob is obviously having fun in the interview.
Dylan continues crafting his persona to this day, alluding in a 2005 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley to a bargain with “the chief commander… on this earth and the world we can’t see.” Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways opens with “I Contain Multitudes.” With a cast of six actors portraying the enigmatic songwriter, Todd Haynes’ 2007 biopic I’m Not There features the subtitle, “Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan.” In the 1973 western feature film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Bob plays a guy named Alias. Pressed for details, the gunslinger replies “Alias is anything you want.” As Dylan told Bradley, “It goes back to that destiny thing.”
Rock star mythology is as old as the “crossroads” story of blues icon Robert Johnson, and Dylan’s image was as artistically, and creatively, curated as his songs. Dylan’s mythology is part of his art, something James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown knowingly celebrates, often by printing the legend even when the history is sitting right there—off-screen.
Here are some legendary highlights A Complete Unknown claims to know:
Consolidation and the Dramatic Importance of Legend
Mangold and Jay Cocks’ screenplay technically adapts Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and The Night That Split the Sixties (2015). That nonfiction book seeks to separate the past from the musings of a restless rockstar whose memories can be interpretational. Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), contains an almost equal amount of fact and revisionist alternative. Perhaps Mangold and Cocks, like so many of Dylan’s fans, prefer the artist’s self-portrait.
For A Complete Unknown, the most glaring errors come from consolidating four years of intense growth into about two hours. Changes for dramatic effect enforce the emotional bond of a cinematic telling, and are unreliable as a chronological narrative. For instance, Dylan brought Robert Shelton’s The New York Times profile to his first studio session at Columbia Records backing folk singer Carolyn Hester on Sept. 29, 1961. The article was not new when Dylan recorded his first album, Bob Dylan, in November. However, rather than fact-check every scene, we think it might be most interesting to look at how the film interprets the biggest early moments and relationships in Dylan’s career…
How Many Roads Does It Take to Sing a Song to Woody?
Dylan did not meet Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey. Dylan tried to visit Guthrie where he lived, in Howard Beach, Queens. The meeting eventually occurred in Jersey’s East Orange at a private home of friend Bob Gleason. Yet many readers of the rock press still learn the event transpired as it did in the film as the story even appeared in rock encyclopedias like Story of Pop (1973). Dylan didn’t sing “Song to Woody” to Guthrie when they met either, though that is often how the story is told.
Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) was also not at the meeting and never shared his couch with the young Dylan. The song Pete wakes to hear Bob beginning, “Girl From the North Country,” wasn’t written until the end of the 1962 tour of England—so a good deal after Dylan arrived in New York as if from smoke.
Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and That Martin Guitar
Dylan and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) met at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, but the “Folsom Prison Blues” singer reached out to the new face of folk through a series of appreciative and encouraging letters, which made the pair lifelong friends. The pair only officially collaborated on Dylan’s 1969 album Nashville Skyline but left a treasure trove of unreleased informal sessions which have been a mainstay of bootleg collectors everywhere. Dylan was featured on the debut of the TV variety show The Johnny Cash Show where they dueted on Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.”
In spite of the film’s grand old-fashioned soap operetta segment, Cash played before Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) at the fateful 1964 Newport Folk Festival, on Friday, July 24. He was not sandwiched between the two headliners. Dylan, meanwhile, played July 26.
While the movie certainly makes an epic moment out of Cash presenting Dylan with his Martin acoustic guitar after the folk singer went electric and burned the proverbial house down at Newport, in reality he gifted it to him after a hotel-room jam in 1964. The gift was a country artist tradition, and each favored a wide range of Martin makes. Cash wasn’t at the Newport Festival in 1965. This detail is not even part of Dylan’s mythology. But now it is Hollywood legend.
Newport Folk Festival 1965 Was Not a Free-for-All Disaster
A Complete Unknown treats The Newport Folk Festival 1965 like the standoff in The Wild One (1953) with Dylan as the leather-jacketed, causeless rebel motorcycle rider. Like Marlon Brando before him. On Saturday, July 24, Dylan performed three acoustic songs, deciding to plug in for the festival closing. “On a whim, he said he wanted to play electric,” Newport roadie Jonathan Taplin remembers in Howard Sounes’ Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (2001). It was not, apparently, the premeditated assault on traditionalist sensibilities depicted onscreen.
Dylan was not the first electric act at the Newport Folk Festival either. Muddy Waters floored the audience with an electric guitar, and Cash’s band featured an electric lead guitarist at the festival in 1964. The controversy is, and has always been, overplayed. However, the altercation between Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), the steadfast keeper of traditional protest music, was reported, though the reaction was expected. Dylan’s new single was rising on the charts, and it was as electrifying as it was divisive.
Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was released in March 1965. Side one is backed by a tight rock band, side two features Dylan on acoustic guitar. On July 20, the six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone” dropped to critical acclaim, and uniformly accommodating radio station play. The 1965 Newport Folk Festival marked the first time Dylan performed the new hit in public—and the majority of the audience probably couldn’t wait to hear it live. The song is strong enough to work with just an acoustic guitar, but Bob really was giving his fans what they deserved.
For the July 25 closing, Dylan played his first concert with electric instruments. He was joined by pianist Barry Goldberg of the Electric Flag, bassist Jerome Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay, with two musicians who played on the radio smash: Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s Mike Bloomfield on lead electric guitar, and guitarist Al Kooper fingering the organ.
Legend says the opening song, “Maggie’s Farm,” drew the bulk of the ire. Footage seen in the documentary films Festival (1967), No Direction Home (2003), and The Other Side of the Mirror (2007) confirm boos and cheers greeted “Maggie’s Farm,” and squabbled for dominance throughout “Like a Rolling Stone.”
“If I had an axe, I’d chop the microphone cable right now,” Seeger is quoted as saying. However, listening to the archival footage, the mix sounds balanced, feedback is controlled, lead vocals are prominent. The sound balance achieves aggressive perfection by “Phantom Engineer.”
“The reason they booed is that he only played for 15 minutes when everybody else played for 45-minutes or an hour,” Kooper explained in No Direction Home. “They didn’t give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more.”
No Direction Home also captures the May 17, 1966 moment when a fan at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England crowd shouts “Judas!” at Dylan. This event did not occur at the Newport Folk Festival 1965, though it has been repeatedly reported as such. Once again A Complete Unknown printed the legend.
Joan Baez Diamonds and Rust
Born to sing in any genre, folk guitar virtuoso steeped in rock and roll classics, Joan Baez hit the national stage with two duets in Bob Gibson’s performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. Dubbed the “barefoot Madonna,” Baez signed with Vanguard Records and made the cover of Time magazine within two years. In spite of the biopic’s fragmentary memory, Dylan wasn’t backstage waiting to play at Gerde’s Folk City while Joan let rip with a blues-infused rendition of “House of the Rising Sun.” Baez went to her usual Greenwich Village haunt to check out the new talent with the growing reputation. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta come down and hear this guy, he’s terrific,’” Baez told Rolling Stone in 1983.
Dylan probably didn’t write “Masters of War” and debut it at the Gaslight the same night he and Joan first got together, even if the evening memorably corresponds to the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point, Dylan enjoyed a mutual flirtation with Baez’s younger sister, the folk singer Mimi Baez Fariña. The romance between Bob and Joan ignited later.
In the Rolling Stone cover story “How Timothée Chalamet ‘Pushed the Bounds’ to Play Bob Dylan in ‘A Complete Unknown,’” Norton revealed Mangold confided that Dylan “insisted on putting at least one wildly inaccurate moment” into A Complete Unknown. The actor did not reveal the detail, but when Mangold appeared concerned about the public reaction, Norton said Dylan stared at him, and explained: “What do you care what other people think?”
To this author, the intentionally inaccurate moment seems to be the onstage antics during the 1965 East Coast tour sequence where Dylan and Baez share the stage. There is no footage, audio, or even musicians’ recollections of any incident where Dylan stops playing after a verse of “All I Really Want to Do,” tells a crowd he doesn’t play requests, and leaves Baez to perform “Blowin’ in the Wind” solo. Had this happened, we’d never have heard the end of it. It would add a whole chapter to the mythos.
Bob Dylan’s self-mythology amuses him, and fans and critics are free to take part in the fun. Baez summed it up best in her exquisite “Diamonds and Rust,” singing “Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic, then give me another word for it. You were so good with words and at keeping things vague.” As the relief subsides that Mangold will not add one more anachronism to A Complete Unknown’s Newport Folk Fest, adding Dylan’s catastrophic 1966 motorcycle crash to an overcrowded finale, it becomes clear: a little mythology keeps some records straight.
A Complete Unknown is playing in theaters now.
The post A Complete Unknown: The Bob Dylan History Left Out in Favor of Mythology appeared first on Den of Geek.
