What A Complete Unknown Gets Right and Wrong About Bob Dylan

By Olivia B. Waxman
December 25, 2024 7:00 AM EST

A Complete Unknown, out in theaters on Dec. 25, stars Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in a highly-anticipated biopic that traces the singer’s rise in the New York City folk music scene of 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 performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, at a time when the folk music scene was split between those who embraced the kinds of electric guitars that defined rock ‘n’ roll and those who thought the acoustic guitar was the 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 like they 100% know Dylan.

“He had become the voice of a generation by age 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 to experts on Dylan’s life about what the movie 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 get paid. Dylan “pushed his way in there,” hitching a ride with two friends and arriving 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 at a club helped the young singer land a record deal at Columbia Records, at a time when many folk musicians had contracts with smaller labels.

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

Dylan’s songwriting stood out in the early 1960s folk scene. According to Gray, most folk artists back then “did not write songs. In fact, many of them felt that you shouldn't write a song because what you were trying to do is get 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 spot at her concerts and covering his songs.

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

The legendary folk artist Woody Guthrie suffered from the brain disorder Huntington’s disease up until his death in 1967. As the movie shows, it is true that Dylan visited Guthrie regularly in the hospital in the early 1960s, and Pete Seeger did, too. Whether Dylan and Seeger and Guthrie were all hanging out in a hospital room on a regular basis is unclear.

However, in the early 1960s, Woody would be wheeled out of his hospital room for get-togethers at friends’ houses and people would come and sing for him. “That actually is more likely where Dylan and Seeger would have overlapped with Guthrie together,” Wald says.

Did Pete Seeger mentor Dylan?

The movie shows Dylan showing up to Guthrie’s hospital room to play him a song, and then Seeger being so impressed by the young man’s playing that he lets him stay with his family. 

While that never happened, Seeger did help launch Dylan by giving him many opportunities to perform. 

According to Wald, the first time Dylan is on stage in front of a really big crowd is at a Pete Seeger hootenanny, in which Seeger brought a number of young performers onstage.

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

In A Complete 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 movie come directly from their letters. 

Cash came to Dylan’s defense at pivotal moments. While Dylan’s first album with Columbia Records wasn’t a big commercial success, Cash, a Columbia Records artist, defended it, so the label didn’t 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, at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan, Baez, Johnny and his future wife June Carter hung out in a hotel room and jumped up and down on the beds, that’s how much fun they had together.

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

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

“He was singing to and for a young, white audience 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 murder 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 who are a threat to them.” 

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

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

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

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

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

Did Dylan really get booed at the Newport Folk Festival?

The movie culminates with the 1965 Newport Folk festival, in which Dylan gets booed by the audience 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 wasn’t 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 singing only three songs, people exploded in booing. How many of them were booing because he'd been electric and how many were booing because he had 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 the big annual bash of folk music, regarded electric music as nasty, commercial—a sellout—and acoustic music as pure and authentic.” Organizers “associated electric music with cheap, pop, rock-and-roll trash.”

But the people who didn’t want Dylan going electric were the minority. There were plenty of attendees who were ready for it.

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