By Andy Greene. Midway through the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown , Dylan has an angry confrontation with his girlfriend, Sylvia Russo, about why he never makes any reference to his past. They forget the rest.
These are two guys with a deep breadth of knowledge about Dylan and his past. In , when he was a student at Kenyon College, Cocks even spent the day with Dylan and wrote about the experience for The Kenyon Collegian. But this is a Hollywood biopic that attempts to cram a very intense four-year period of history into a two-hour-andminute movie.
The filmmakers had little choice but to compress the timeline, eliminate major characters, and favor emotional truth over strict historical truth. And to be clear, A Complete Unknown is a stellar film: Dylan newbies and longtime fans alike should enjoy it.
If you have seen it, read ahead to see where the movie veers away from the historical record. Underhill has been removed from the story in A Complete Unknown. Dylan takes a taxi and meets the ailing singer at his bedside. This is inaccurate. In an unpublished portion of a interview with Rolling Stone , Seeger recalled his actual first meeting with Dylan.
I remember sitting down on a long table with a bunch of other people who were going to be on. In the movie, he motions for Dylan to play a song on the guitar. He was actually inspired to write the song by the time they spent together in New Jersey throughout early Dylan was essentially homeless when he arrived in New York.
