Is “A Complete Unknown” accurate?

Spoiler alert! We’re discussing the new Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” (in theaters now). If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t think twice and save our story for later.

What is fact and what is fiction in “A Complete Unknown,” the story of Bob Dylan’s first four years as a star?

The subject itself has proven so sensitive with his biography – as a new star, he told reporters he was from New Mexico, not Minnesota, and deluded about being in a traveling circus – that a small army of Dylan chroniclers all Had his hands full trying to hide the truth.

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But director James Mangold wasn’t making a documentary, so he felt free to play with events and dates in the early 1960s to advance his film.

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“You do a biopic and you assume you’re doing a history lesson with text on the screen labeling things, but I had no interest in that,” Mangold tells USA TODAY. “I wanted to tell the story with the same authority as a feature film where the data doesn’t play as much of a role. I kept saying, ‘We’re not doing the Disney Hall of Presidents where the animatronic president gives a famous speech.’ .”

An online search of the facts in “A Complete Unknown” will reveal countless lists of date changes, character mergers, and outright speculation that Mangold used in his storytelling. We consulted with the director and one of the film’s stars, Edward Norton (who plays Pete Seeger), to clarify some particularly standout scenes.

Was Pete Seeger in the room when Bob Dylan visited his hero Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital?

Various accounts of Dylan’s early days in New York suggest that he first met Pete Seeger when the veteran folk-folk attended the newcomer’s performance in Greenwich Village. An intrigued Seeger quickly kept track of the ingenuity.

In “A Complete Unknown,” it is implied that this first encounter occurred when Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) visited an ailing Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) at Greystone, a psychiatric facility in New Jersey. Norton is confident that both men may have been present at Guthrie’s bedside on several occasions, as Seeger was a close friend of the “This Land Is Your Land” composer and Dylan visited him often.

The film “condensed a few things, but Pete was Woody’s sidekick the longest. “So if Pete and Bob didn’t meet there first, they were definitely there together,” says Norton. As to whether Dylan actually sang his composition “Song to Woody” to Guthrie, Norton says, “It was his first composition, so I don’t think there’s any doubt that he would have played it to him.”

Is Sylvie Russo, Bob Dylan’s first New York girlfriend in the film, a real person?

Bob Dylan’s first serious New York love was Suze Rotolo, a politically active young woman who greatly influenced the musician. On the cover of his second album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Rotolo is famously the woman walking arm in arm with Dylan down a frozen street in Greenwich Village.

In Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, the singer remembers their first meeting: “From the beginning I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I had ever seen. She was fair-skinned and golden-haired, full-blooded Italian.

In A Complete Unknown, Rotolo’s character was renamed Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). The request was made by Dylan himself. “He just asked me if that could be changed,” says Mangold. “He still has a fondness for her. She is deceased but was an early love in his life before he became Bob Dylan.”

Did the fans at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival really scream “Judas!”? with Bob Dylan because he played an electric set?

Dylan turned away from folk music in the mid-’60s and desperately wanted to be in a band and take part in the electric music revolution. This decision angered fans who considered him a traitor to their cause. Some began shouting “Judas!” during concerts.

In “A Complete Unknown,” these shouts occur during his raucous 1965 Newport Folk Festival show, known as the moment “Dylan went electric.” But as DA Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back shows, these screams are more likely to be associated with British fans during a tour of England in 1965.

“He first auditioned his electric stuff abroad, which was the impetus for the ‘Judas’ stuff,” says Mangold. “But I moved it to Newport because I couldn’t show it to the audience twice. And the point of the scene is that he comes out as a rocker in the backyard of the people who made him a folk superstar.”

Did Pete Seeger try to cut the cords when Bob Dylan performed his electric set at the Newport Folk Festival?

There’s no question that Seeger, a longtime champion of Dylan’s folk talent, was disappointed when the star defied Newport Folk Festival programmers by playing a loud, if short, set with electric instruments.

But was he looking for an ax to cut the audio cables?

“A lot of urban myths arose in that moment,” Norton says. “I spoke to Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) who was there and Pete’s eldest daughter who was 17 and standing there thought he said, ‘If I had an axe I would Cut the cable.” His daughter said she had never seen him so angry in his life, and her mother Toshi intervened, the film shows.

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