The day before I went to see A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, I saw a flame war erupt on a friend’s Facebook page after he wrote a post enthusing about how much he enjoyed the film.
Some blokes of a certain age who consider themselves self-appointed keepers of the Dylan legacy – and let’s face it, it’s always blokes of a certain age – were railing against what they perceived as a travesty. One of these Dylan-bores, after giving a damning appraisal of the film, admitted that he hadn’t actually seen it. He’d watched the trailer and decided it was just too inaccurate for him to bother wasting his precious time. Now, that’s what I call an informed opinion.
As for those who did deign to see it, their fact-checking bazookas were set to stun. Oh my God, the inaccuracies! Everyone knows Dylan didn’t debut The Times They Are A-Changin’ at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival! In fact, he never sang it at Newport in any year at all! And no-one yelled out “Judas!” at Newport in 1965 when he went electric! Because that happened at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester the following year! And why isn’t Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in the film? Or Phil Ochs? And what about this Sylvie Russo character? She’s not even real! She’s completely made up! Yeah, yeah, she’s meant to be based on Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo, but I have serious issues with that, because I’ve read her book, goddamnit, and they got everything wrong!
And on and on. And on. They really got their bootlegs in a twist.
Firstly, let me just say one thing to these guys. It’s a biopic. It’s not a documentary. See the difference?
There is not a single biopic in the history of biopics that is totally factually accurate. And there’s a good reason for that. In order to tell an entertaining story about a real person on screen in a couple of hours or less, you have to compress, alter, conflate and even fictionalise certain aspects of that person’s story. This is called movie-making. It’s not documenting real life blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute, fact-by-fact.
Some of the haters have even weighed in on Timothée Chalamet. One was mortified that an actor played Dylan, because it should have been a real singer. To which I say: pull your head in. No matter what you think of the rest of the film, Chalamet is a revelation. He went above and beyond to learn to play guitar and harmonica and sing, as well as taking on Dylan’s look and mannerisms. From the staccato mumble of Dylan’s speaking voice to the barbed wire howl of his singing voice, he got it down, along with the trado younsformation from dungaree-clad folkie to the wired, stick-thin iconoclast of the mid-’60s with Wayfarers, a halo of unkempt curls and an ever-present cigarette.
Chalamet recently appeared on SNL and performed three Dylan songs. Two of them, Outlaw Blues and Three Angels, were such deep cuts that Dylan himself had only performed the former once, and the latter, not at all. To choose to play those songs was a masterstroke. I took it as a “f--- you” to the critics. I can also imagine Dylan watching and smiling to himself, thinking, “This guy gets it.”
'Bob Dylan is a construct. He’s complicated. He contains multitudes. He’s been so many different people over the years that it’s hard to tell who the real Robert Zimmerman is anymore. Maybe even he doesn’t know.'
And speaking of Dylan, the man is infamous for being an unreliable narrator of his own story. He has played hard and fast with the facts about his life for years. In his early days in New York, he used to tell people he grew up in New Mexico, he ran away from home repeatedly as a kid, he joined a travelling circus and he learned to play slide guitar from a one-eyed black musician named Wigglefoot. Of course, none of this was true. He has always told porkies, exaggerated wildly and contradicted himself, sometimes to mess with journalists, sometimes to cover his tracks and sometimes because he just appeared to get a kick out of making up stuff.
His 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, was revealed to be full of fabrications and flights of fancy. Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin went as far as saying, “Jesus Christ, as far as I can tell almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction.”
The book even cribbed from works of literature (including Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and H.G. Wells), self-help books, a book about the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton scandal and an entire section about New York borrowed heavily from a 1961 Time magazine story. It’s all part of the Dylan myth-making process and magpie approach to story-telling, and it’s something we’ve come to expect from him. Half the fun is trying to tease out how he’s mixed fact and fiction over the years.
The fact is, Bob Dylan is a construct. He’s complicated. He contains multitudes. He’s been so many different people over the years – folk hero, protest song figurehead, Judas, speed-freak genius, family man, born-again Christian, never-ending live performer, interpreter of the classics, radio show DJ, living legend, Nobel Laureate – that it’s hard to tell who the real Robert Zimmerman is anymore. Maybe even he doesn’t know.
And the final nail in the coffin of the naysayers’ arguments? Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger in the film, has said that Dylan himself encouraged director James Mangold to include at least one “totally inaccurate” moment in the film.
When Mangold wondered out loud if this was such a good idea, because he was worried about what people would think, Dylan, who had previously delighted in the fake characters and cheeky false narratives planted throughout the 2019 Martin Scorsese pseudo-documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, reportedly had this to say: “What do you care what other people think?”
Barry Divola is an author, musician and journalist who writes regularly for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. His latest book is the novel Driving Stevie Fracasso. Follow his writing at: authory.com/BarryDivola
Main image: