Another key character in the drama is Dylan’s first New York girlfriend Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning, who appears at Dylan’s request as a character with a different name, Sylvie Russo. Although she was not a musician, Rotolo helped fuel Dylan’s lyrical activism.
“Their relationship was pure, so I think he was protecting her,” Mangold says of Dylan’s request for a name change. “It was clear to me that he still loved Suze even though she had passed away, as she was an early love in his life before he became Bob Dylan.”
For “A Complete Unknown,” director James Mangold tried to avoid biographical tropes
Dylan has had a remarkable career trajectory, from solo troubadour to rebel rocker to devout Christian to rugged raconteur. By recounting only those early years, Mangold chose to tell the story of young lives colliding.
“A vagabond arrives in New York and reinvents himself, with $10 in his pocket and a song in his Moleskine notebook that he wants to sing for his hero (Guthrie), who is in a New Jersey hospital,” says he. “It sounds like a movie if you just describe the reality of its opening moments.”
Mangold’s film focuses on invisible sparks, such as “two people in their underwear singing ‘Blowin’ in Wind’ in Greenwich Village while there’s a garbage truck outside the window,” he says. “This moment is great for me. It’s counterintuitive when you consider the cultural impact of the song, but of course the musicians of these songs were not aware of the cultural impact when they created them.”
The cast of the Bob Dylan film learned to sing and play instruments
The main actors spent more than a year taking singing and music lessons. “I’ve played guitar, but it’s easy compared to the banjo,” Norton jokes, noting that Seeger’s claw-hammer picking technique is difficult to master.
But Norton not only learned to play the instrument, he also went out of his way to understand Seeger’s friendly, if reserved, demeanor.
“There’s a scene in the movie where Dylan reconnects with Seeger after a while, so I asked Joan (Baez), would you and Pete hug if you hadn’t seen each other?” Norton says, laughing. “She said, ‘Oh God, no! We were hippies, he was from the Depression era. That banjo was his shield.’ She described him to me as a Calvinist preacher.
Baez also helped Barbaro craft her portrayal of the singer, who was already famous (Time put her on the cover in 1962) when her relationship with the little-known Dylan took off.
“I was hesitant to approach her at first because I had put her on a pedestal,” says Barbaro, who learned guitar from scratch for the role. “But I had dreams about it and thought I had to meet her. Joan is a brave person so I thought if she were me she would come forward and I did.”
The resulting conversation helped Barbaro distance himself from Baez. “Talking to her allowed me to finally let go of the tension and tight control over doing it right and just being myself,” she says.
For Mangold, the film was about finding a new place for Bob Dylan outside of DA Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, Martin Scorsese’s epic 2005 film No Direction Home, or Dylan’s own surrealist autobiography Chronicles: Volume One” from 2004 can be found. “
“In many ways it was all a fairy tale,” he says. “I just wanted to get to know these people back then and express the uniqueness of the moments and the music and their rivalries, loves and jealousies.”
