Bob Dylan Insisted on Putting One False Story in Biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’

For an artist as deeply beloved and frustratingly opaque as Bob Dylan, creating a biopic about the folk-rock legend is difficult for multiple reasons: fans want Dylan’s legacy dutifully respected, Dylan has made a point to keep that legacy liquid and uncapturable, and the upcoming biopic’s figurehead made a point to advocate for putting false stories into the script of A Complete Unknown.

Simply put, A Complete Unknown director James Mangold had his work cut out for him. Of course, when he brought up his concerns to his film’s subject, Dylan responded with an appropriately glib Dylan retort that would have fit right in place with the script, too.

Bob Dylan Put A False Story In Upcoming Biopic

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown details the rise of Bob Dylan from an aspiring folkie and Woody Guthrie disciple from Minnesota to the sunglasses-clad, tousled-haired, highly controversial rock ‘n’ roll convert. The film features Timothee Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, and Top Gun actor Monica Barbaro as Dylan’s ex-collaborator and partner, Joan Baez.

For the most part, the biopic does what audiences expect it to do: tell the artist’s story accurately and entertainingly. But as Norton put it in a November 2024 Rolling Stone cover story, there are plenty of creative liberties in the film, both from the production team and Dylan himself. Norton said of his director, “Jim wasn’t interested in doing another documentary. He was interested in almost a fable.”

Norton said Mangold had disclosed an interesting conversation the director had with Dylan, during which Dylan requested Mangold include a wholly false story in the biopic script. (What, exactly, that lie is, Mangold won’t say, leaving us to find out for ourselves when the film comes out on Christmas Day, 2024.) When Mangold pushed back against Dylan’s suggestion, citing possible anger from fans, Dylan glibly replied: “What do you care what other people think?”

Other Moments of Stretched or Omitted Truths

Even within the context of Bob Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame, there are some elements of his story that director James Mangold had to omit or elaborate on to meet Hollywood’s “movie magic” standards. Pete Seeger’s explosive reaction to Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which included him trying to cut the power to the stage with a nearby ax, didn’t make it into the film, despite being a pivotal moment in Dylan’s mentor-student relationship with Seeger.

In other cases, biopic writers expanded on conversations slightly. Elle Fanning, who plays Sylvie Russo (a political activist and Dylan’s ex-girlfriend, who was actually Suze Rotolo), described one such exchange in the Rolling Stone cover story. While the break-up between Dylan and Rotolo was very much non-fictional, the film added a line in which Dylan tells Rotolo not to come back from a European trip to live with Dylan in the States. “We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something—or regretting something that he said to her,” Fanning said.

All in all, A Complete Unknown seems to hold promises of equal parts accuracy and obfuscation, and we would expect nothing less from an artist who is as poetically vulnerable and stoically private as Bob Dylan.

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