The True Story Behind ‘A Complete Unknown’

A complete unknownout in theaters on December 25, starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in a long-awaited biopic that traces the singer’s rise in New York City’s folk music scene in the 1960s.

Focusing on the period between 1961 and 1965 – when Dylan first became a big star – the story is told chronologically and looks at the people who helped him along the way, both musicians like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and love interests like Suze Russo (Elle Fanning). and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). The film culminates in Dylan’s controversial appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, at a time when the folk music scene was divided between those who embraced the kind of electric guitars that defined rock ‘n’ roll and those who believed that the acoustic guitar was more authentic form of entertainment. And true to the film’s title, even viewers who know Dylan’s songs by heart will not come away from the film feeling that they 100% know Dylan.

“He had become the voice of a generation by the age of 24,” says Elijah Wald, who wrote a book that inspired the film Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the night that split the sixties.

TIME spoke with experts on Dylan’s life about what the film gets right and wrong about the folk singer’s rise to fame.

How did Dylan get his big break?

Dylan was “in the right place at the right time,” says Michael Gray, author of Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan. There were several clubs in New York City where musicians could play as long as they didn’t expect to be paid. Dylan “pushed his way in there” and took a trip with two friends and arrived in New York City’s Greenwich Village in January 1961.

In 1961, Robert Shelton’s glowing New York Times review of Dylan’s supporting act in a club helped the young singer land a record deal with Columbia Records, at a time when many folk musicians were signed to smaller labels.

However, Bob Dylan (1962), his first album with Columbia, was a flop. It is his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) – which includes “Blowin’ in the Wind” – which brought him a new level of fame.

Dylan’s songwriting stood out in the early 1960s folk scene. According to Gray, most folk artists of the time “didn’t write songs. In fact, many of them felt that you shouldn’t write a song because what you were trying to do was go back to the earliest possible, most pristine version of an Irish, English or Scottish folk song.”

Joan Baez, who dated Dylan, also helped him by giving him a guest slot at her concerts and covering his songs.

Did Dylan really show up at Woody Guthrie’s hospital room and play for him?

Legendary folk artist Woody Guthrie suffered from the brain disease Huntington’s disease until his death in 1967. As the film shows, it is true that Dylan visited Guthrie regularly in the hospital in the early 1960s, and so did Pete Seeger. Whether Dylan and Seeger and Guthrie all hung out in a hospital room on a regular basis is unclear.

But in the early 1960s, Woody was wheeled out of his hospital room to get together at friends’ homes, and people would come and sing to him. “It’s actually more likely where Dylan and Seeger would have overlapped Guthrie together,” Wald says.

Did Pete Seeger mentor Dylan?

The film shows Dylan appearing in Guthrie’s hospital room to play him a song, after which Seeger is so impressed by the young man’s playing that he lets him stay with his family.

Although it never happened, Seeger helped launch Dylan by giving him many opportunities to perform.

According to Wald, the first time Dylan was on stage in front of a really large audience was at a Pete Seeger hootenanny, where Seeger brought a number of young performers on stage.

Was Johnny Cash really one of Dylan’s biggest fans?

IN A completely unknown, Dylan gets fan letters from Cash.

It is true that the singer-songwriter was one of Dylan’s biggest supporters, and several of the lines in the film come directly from their letters.

Cash came to Dylan’s defense at crucial moments. While Dylan’s first album with Columbia Records was not a huge commercial success, Cash, a Columbia Records artist, championed it so the label did not drop Dylan, according to Gray.

Cash covered several Dylan songs. “Understand Your Man”, one of Cash’s biggest hits of the 1960s, was inspired by Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.

According to Wald, Dylan, Baez, Johnny and his future wife June Carter hung out in a hotel room and jumped up and down on the beds at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, they had so much fun together.

How did the political movements of the 1960s affect Dylan’s music?

Dylan wasn’t afraid to get political, and some of his early songs are directly influenced by the civil rights movement, such as the line “How many roads must a man go down before you call him a man?” from “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

“He was singing to and for a young, white audience that was trying to figure out its place in this huge movement that was going on,” Wald explains.

Gray points out that the song “Only a Pawn in Their Game”—which mentions the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers at the beginning—was radical at the time because it argued “poor whites are being manipulated by those in charge to feel that it’s poor blacks , there is a threat to them.”

His partner Suze Rotolo, who appears on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was a civil rights activist who volunteered in the New York office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The film shows her lecturing Dylan about CORE, one of the major civil rights organizations at the time.

Did a guitarist really play the organ in “Like a Rolling Stone”?

Yes, as the film shows, Al Kooper showed up to play guitar for the recording, but there was already a guitarist.

He saw an organ on the set, played with it and ended up coming up with the iconic organ number in the song.

“From then on he was a keyboard player,” says Wald.

Was Dylan really booed at the Newport Folk Festival?

The film culminates at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where Dylan is booed by the crowd after playing an electric guitar instead of an acoustic guitar.

In real life, he was booed after an awkward performance. According to Wald, the band was not well rehearsed and there were long gaps between songs as the band members figured out what to do with themselves. As Wald explains, “When he left the stage after only three songs, people exploded into boos. How many of them booed because he’d been electric, and how many booed because he’d left the stage? It’s impossible to sort out .”

So why was going electric so controversial?

As Gray explains: “The Newport Folk Festival, which was folk music’s great annual bash, considered electric music ugly, commercial—a sellout—and acoustic music pure and authentic.” The organizers “associated electric music with cheap, pop, rock-and-roll garbage.”

But the people who didn’t want Dylan to go electric were the minority. There were plenty of participants ready for it.

“Dylan was infinitely more popular when he went electric than before,” says Wald, “and that boo became part of his legend because it countered the charge that he sold out and became a pop star.”