‘A Complete Unknown’ director James Mangold reveals what’s fact vs. fiction

A musical biopic is never going to be completely true to life.

When you’re crafting a dramatic arc, certain things have to be invented, imagined, condensed, and so forth. That certainly holds true with A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new biopic about Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), now in theaters.

« We didn’t want to make a pseudo-documentary, » Mangold tells Entertainment Weekly. « We wanted to make a movie, so it wasn’t like we’re going to run around chasing the actors with handheld cameras. I wanted you to see what you couldn’t see in a documentary film, which was the more intimate moments and moments in between the public moments. »

Indeed, Mangold points to plenty of excellent Dylan documentaries if that’s what someone wants, including No Direction Home and Don’t Look Back.

Still, while filmmakers might have to imagine dialogue of more private moments, they also try to rely on facts as much as possible. For that, they turned to archival footage, letters, and Mangold’s own lengthy conversations with the artist, all of which infused the film.

A Complete Unknown follows a young Dylan as he first comes to New York to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). He also meets folk legend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and is propelled into the folk world, quickly rising as a singer-songwriter. In between a romance with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and dalliances with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), he becomes a superstar. But everything changes when Dylan decides he wants to go electric, abandoning the acoustic folk music that made him famous.

Here, Mangold breaks down some major moments in the film and how much is drawn from real life.

Bob Dylan travels to New York explicitly to meet Woody Guthrie and ends up crashing with Pete Seeger

This is true in spirit if not in fact. « Bob certainly arrived in New York and went to see Woody Guthrie, » Mangold says. « That was his whole goal. In fact, there was this beautiful object that Timothée found when he was doing research. He found a gentleman who collects Dylan paraphernalia. It was a record sleeve of a Woody Guthrie 78 record, on which Bob had drawn himself in pencil in the lower left corner holding a guitar case and a winding road up to the upper right of the record sleeve in which was the picture of New York City. »

« It says ‘Woody in NYC,’ and on the road, there’s a little sign that says, ‘Bound for Glory,' » Mangold continues. « That was done by a 17- or 18-year-old Bob Dylan already making this plan to trek all the way to New York to meet his hero. And I’ve left out the most important thing — in the lower right of the record were the first stanza of lyrics of the song for Woody. »

In the film, Dylan specifically seeks Guthrie out to play him this song — and it’s this that impresses both Guthrie and Seeger and leads them to think that Dylan could be a powerful force in folk music. This is an invention, as Dylan did not first meet Guthrie at the hospital, nor Seeger at Guthrie’s bedside.

Additionally, Dylan did frequently couch-surf in his early days in New York, but it’s unclear if he actually ever crashed at Seeger’s house. For Mangold, it was more about the metaphorical role the folk icon played at the beginning of Dylan’s career. « Pete Seeger served as a shelter against the storm for Bob, » notes Mangold.

From his first days in New York, Bob Dylan resisted being classified as a « folk artist »

As Seeger drives Dylan home from Guthrie’s hospital, he asks him about his taste in music. Dylan tells him that he likes a bit of everything, including Johnny Cash and Buddy Holly. « I don’t think of myself as a folk musician, » he tells Seeger.

While we don’t know if this conversation happened, it is true to Seeger’s beliefs about music and Dylan’s dialogue is lifted from a radio interview he gave. « Pete Seeger definitely was an evangelist for folk music, » Mangold notes. « With a young musician who he saw having such immense talent as a folk singer, he wanted to know whether they were on the same team and saw things the same way. »

« Bob from the very beginning resisted all categorization, » the director adds. « In fact, a large part of his dialogue in that scene comes from an extremely early radio interview he did in 1962. That whole part where he is like, ‘I’m not saying I’m a folk singer. I mean I do sing folk songs, but not exactly’ —that entire thing is verbatim Bob Dylan dialogue. »

Sylvie Russo was Dylan’s first great love

Yes…and no. As has been noted elsewhere, Russo is based on Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first love and the woman who appears with him on the cover of his star-making The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album.

Rotolo is well-known to Dylan fans, and she even wrote a memoir about her relationship with the artist, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. The memoir came out in 2009, and Rotolo died in 2011 at only 67 years old.

Until her memoir, Rotolo had maintained strict privacy about her memories of her time with Dylan. In keeping with that and in honor of her memory, Dylan had one request for the filmmakers — that they change Rotolo’s name because she was and remained a private person rather than a public artist. Indeed, both her memoir and the film indicate that it was Dylan’s ever-increasing fame that doomed their romance.

At a Q&A following a screening of the film, Mangold explained that he got the sense that Dylan made this request because the « relationship is sacred to him. » Mangold further expounded on the request to EW, saying, « I only know the reasons Bob told me. It seemed to me I had already won the trifecta in terms of him giving me permission to make so much of the movie that he had this one personal request about someone who’d already passed on.

« The one thing I felt from him in those conversations is tremendous warmth and affection for her, » the director adds. « While his relationships were more complicated with everyone else, I sensed that this was one where there was just tremendous fondness and gratitude for their young life together. »

Bob and Sylvie/Suze saw Now, Voyager on their first date

« Bob was a film buff, but it was an invention, » Mangold admits of this pivotal romantic scene. « I chose that movie because it brought up the topic of someone reinventing themselves and restarting their life and rebuilding themselves anew, which I thought was a really interesting thing to raise between Sylvie and Bob early on. And to see Bob’s slight sensitivity about the questions about this since he was busy reinventing himself at that moment. »

However, Mangold says he also wanted to include this scene because of how much of a cinephile Dylan is in real life. « Dylan is really interested in movies, » he notes. « When I sat and talked with him four or five times for long periods, he knew my whole catalog of movies. I could refer to anything from Kurosawa films to Wim Wenders movies to other musical films. He always knew exactly what I was talking about. He clearly enjoys taking in all this stuff. »

Mangold notes it’s a throughline he’s found with rock & roll artists and songwriters, including Johnny Cash when he made Walk the Line. « The relationship of movies and rock & roll and singer-songwriters is really powerful, » he notes. « When [Johnny Cash] was just starting out at Sun Records, so much of his persona was based on what he had seen coming out of the Actor’s Studio and this new, mumbling, naturalistic, sensual world of young actors who existed in a more real space than what had been done before. I certainly found that was true for Dylan as well, that he had taken tremendous inspiration from what he had seen at the cinema. »

Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan were long-time pen pals

This is 100 percent true. Mangold knew of the letters (and makes passing mention of them) when he made Walk the Line. But he didn’t get to read them until he was prepping for A Complete Unknown.

« I didn’t know anyone had them, » he explains. « I started work on writing this movie, and I called up Jeff Rosen, Bob’s manager. I asked him, ‘Do you have the letters that Johnny Cash wrote to Bob?’ And he goes, ‘Oh yes.’ So, he sent them to me. Those words are exactly those letters. That correspondence comes from Bob’s archives. The very specific line where Johnny says, ‘Bob, track some mud on the carpet,’ that’s literally what Johnny said to Bob in the letters. »

However, it must be noted that Cash didn’t perform directly before Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival as depicted in the film. He did play prior to Baez, but Dylan didn’t perform his set until two days later.

Bob Dylan made an appearance on Pete Seeger’s TV show

As far as we can tell, this one is entirely fiction. Seeger did have a long-running show, Rainbow Quest, that aired in New York and New Jersey and existed to feature folk, blues, and bluegrass musicians. But it doesn’t seem that Dylan ever made an appearance on the show, as he does in the film, showing up late to a planned segment.

The scene was already in the script that Jay Cocks wrote when Mangold came on to the project. « Pete had this show and only some of the tapes of the show exist anymore, » he explains. « It was a fabulous show, but I’m not sure Bob was on it. »

Furthermore, Seeger’s guest on this show, Jesse Moffette, is entirely an invention. No such blues guitarist existed.

Bob Dylan refused to play « Blowin’ In the Wind » while touring with Joan Baez

Many of the details of this tour are hazy, so we can’t be sure if this onstage fight between the two paramours happened. However, it is representative of numerous accounts of Dylan’s general disinterest in playing the folk hits that made him a star by 1965.

« There was a point of transition when he was in the studio where he was reluctant or resistant to playing it, » Mangold notes. « It would be like asking someone to play the greatest hits, and he was trying to move on to something new. A lot of that dialogue was also taken from Dylan from a collage of other Dylan moments. »

Johnny Cash encouraged Bob Dylan to do an electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival

While their correspondence indicates that Cash regularly encouraged Dylan to ignore naysayers and remain true to his artistic instincts, the scene where an intoxicated Cash convinces Dylan to go through with the set is pure fiction.

In fact, according to the line-up, Cash wasn’t even at the 1965 festival (or at least, he never played a set at it). « Johnny was encouraging Bob not to listen to the potentates of folk music in his letters, » Mangold notes.

Dylan did go back out and play two acoustic songs, « Mr. Tambourine Man » and « It’s All Over, Baby Blue » (the film only shows him doing the latter) on Johnny Cash’s guitar. However, Cash was not backstage to hand it to him. In fact, Cash had given him the guitar at the 1964 festival the year prior as a gesture of admiration. The 1964 festival was the first time the two men met in person.

Bob Dylan playing electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival brought festival brass to blows

In the film, Dylan’s determination to play electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (and his eventual actual performance) ignites a firestorm within the folk world, with purists wanting to ban him from the stage.

As the film builds to this climactic moment, it shows men like folk historian Albert Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) practically coming to blows with Dylan and his team (and eventually Loman and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, played by Dan Fogler, do get into a physical altercation backstage). But was the tribalism between folk and rock music actually this intense?

In short answer, yes. « People said that they had never seen Pete Seeger so angry, » Mangold says. « The folk tale is that he grabbed an ax and tried to smash the mixing board. We didn’t quite take it that far. It is a documented fact that Al Lomax and Albert Grossman got in a fistfight backstage during the concert. Those are not really dramatic inventions. Even Bob Dylan refers to that night as a fiasco. It was clearly a messy affair. »

Bob Dylan was booed and the audience threw things at him when he went electric

The film comes to its climax as Dylan and his band play three electric songs, including « Like a Rolling Stone, » to a mixed but largely hostile reaction from the crowd. Mangold played up the anger for dramatic effect, but he does note that the accounts of the night are so varied that it’s difficult to parse what actually happened.

« There’s very different testimony, » he explains. « There was testimony that there were bottles and programs being hurled at the stage. There were also some fans loving it. There were also fans getting in fights with each other in the audience. The tribalism was real, and the threat was real. »

Mangold notes that one moment, when a member of the audience screams at Dylan that he’s a « Judas, » was borrowed from another concert the following year. « That came from a concert in Manchester, England, » he says. »But it happened. It was just a concert a little while later. But if you see the documentary interviews from the Manchester concerts where he also went electric, you can feel the hot rage from these Dylan fans who feel utterly betrayed that he has moved in this new direction. »

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.