Bob Dylan insisted on putting one totally made-up fact into biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’: “He’s such a troublemaker”

Bob Dylan insisted on inserting a made-up fact into the forthcoming biopic A Complete Unknown. 

The film charts Dylan’s controversial switch from acoustic to electric guitar in the mid-’60s and will be released in US cinemas on December 25, with a UK release to follow on January 17. Dylan served as an executive producer on the film, which is an adaptation of Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.

Several people involved in the film, including director James Mangold, as well as actors Timothée Chalamet (Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger) and  Elle Fanning (Sylvie Russo, a fictionalised version of Dylan’s first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who died in 2011), spoke to Rolling Stone about how the film came together.

Dylan had several meetings with Mangold in Los Angeles and went through the screenplay, line by line. “Jim has an annotated Bob script lying around somewhere,” Chalamet told the outlet. “I’ll beg him to get my hands on it. He’ll never give it to me.”

“I felt like Bob just wanted to know what I was up to,” Mangold said. “ ‘Who is this guy? Is he a shithead? Does he get it?’ — I think the normal questions anyone asks when they’re throwing themselves in league with someone.”

Dylan personally added a line to the script for a scene where Chalamet and Fanning argue. was something like, ‘Don’t even bother coming back,’” Fanning said. “We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something — or regretting something that he said to her.”

In addition, Fanning said that she was told Dylan wanted the film to avoid using Rotolo’s real name – Mangold wouldn’t confirm this definitively. To Dylan, Rotolo was “a very private person and didn’t ask for this life,” Fanning explained, adding: “She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.”

Dylan also insisted on there being at least one totally inaccurate moment into A Complete Unknown. According to Norton, when Mangrove was concerned about the public’s reaction, Dylan stared at him and said: “What do you care what other people think?”

“He’s such a troublemaker,” Norton said, pointing to Dylan’s “obvious pleasure in obfuscation and distortion.” It’s in keeping with Dylan’s tendency to play with truth – his memoir Chronicles is partly fictionalised and he worked with Martin Scorsese to incorporate fictional elements into 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue documentary.

Meanwhile, Chalamet learned to play 30 songs in preparation for the film, taking lessons with a vocal coach, a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach and even a harmonica tutor. All of these are played live in the film. “You can’t re-create it in the studio,” he said. “If I was singing to a prerecorded guitar, then all of a sudden I could hear the lack of an arm movement in my voice.” However, he has still not yet met or spoken to Dylan, who didn’t come to the set at all.

Fanning admitted to tearing up when she first heard Chalamet sing on set. “We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists. Jim would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’

“All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.”

Recently, Chalamet gave a preview of the film by dropping his version of one of Dylan’s most iconic tracks, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, originally released on the 1965 album ‘Bringing It All Back Home’.

In other news, Chalamet recently showed up at his own lookalike competition in New York City, among around 900 other wannabe Chalamets. A top prize of $50 (£39) in cash and a trophy was on offer for the winner – although it is unclear whether Chalamet himself was eligible.

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