Timothée Chalamet doing his best Dylan while Edward Norton as Pete Seeger watches in “A Complete Unknown.”
Credit...Searchlight Pictures

Who’s Who in the Bob Dylan Biopic, ‘A Complete Unkown’

The biopic, with Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, is peppered with figures from the folk world and beyond. These are some of them.

by · NY Times

In some ways, the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” is a family drama.

The director James Mangold saw the climax of the film, Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where his choice to perform backed by an electrified rock band caused an uproar among the folk-music establishment, as “a kind of Thanksgiving blowup, a holiday dinner gone awry in which a prodigal son comes out and won’t toe the family line anymore, and tries to demonstrate his independence.”

The story follows Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) over the foundational years leading up to that concert. It begins with his arrival in New York City in 1961. These are some of the people he meets along the way.

Pete Seeger (Edward Norton)

Dylan entered a folk music scene largely shaped by Pete Seeger. Seeger’s influence was multifaceted: After helping found the leftist folk group the Almanac Singers in the 1940s, he went on to success as a solo artist and as a member of the Weavers. He both interpreted established folk songs and wrote his own, which were often overtly political but not always. “There were all these different strains of the folk music revival, or scene, whatever you want to call it,” said the music historian and musician Elijah Wald, “and all of them came out of Pete Seeger.” (Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!” was the basis for “A Complete Unknown.”) Mangold saw Seeger and Dylan as akin to father and son, or brothers. “There’s a kind of cleave that develops between them over ideology or dogma,” he said, “Or if anything, Bob’s absence of a dogma — that he kind of just wants to be free without fences.”

Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy)

The young Dylan was influenced by both the music of Woody Guthrie and the self-mythologizing of Guthrie’s partly fictional autobiography, “Bound for Glory” (1943). During his early days in New York, Dylan tracked down the older man, but by this point in Guthrie’s life, the voice that had, perhaps most famously, once sung “This Land Is Your Land,” had been taken by Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative illness that led to Guthrie’s living out his final years at psychiatric hospitals in New Jersey and New York. Yesi Ramirez, the casting director for “A Complete Unknown,” gave a disclaimer to actors up for the part of the older artist: “Look, there are no lines. His disease does not permit him to speak.” The film, doing a little mythologizing of its own, takes liberties with how and where Dylan meets him. But the connection it shows was real. “Everybody who was close to Woody remembers Dylan as having been particularly devoted, and as Woody particularly liking him,” Wald said. “That was a unique relationship.”

Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning)

Dylan’s primary love interest in the film is a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, the artist and activist pictured walking beside Dylan through a slushy Greenwich Village on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Mangold changed Rotolo’s name at Dylan’s request. The reason was straightforward, he said: “What Bob expressed to me was just that this was not a public person.” But, Mangold added, if the name change leads to some confusion, so much the better. “That’s kind of a Bob trademark anyway,” he said, “leaving one little burdock in your shoe that’s going to cause everyone to ask a question, or try and find a greater meaning.”

Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro)

By the time Dylan released his self-titled debut album in 1962, Joan Baez was already a folk star. Yet the path she took was, Wald said, “absolutely, studiedly uncommercial.” She broke out at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival after singing with the folk musician Bob Gibson, who’d brought her there. Then, despite interest from major companies, she signed with the highbrow label Vanguard. She later became artistically and romantically involved with Dylan, and invited him onstage before he got famous. “She took Dylan across the country,” Wald said, “with people going, ‘Yuck, why are we hearing this kid with the whiny voice? We’ve come to hear Joan Baez.’”

Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler)

A manager, not a musician, Albert Grossman nonetheless proves to be one of the loudest figures in “A Complete Unknown.” In his 2004 memoir, Dylan likened Grossman’s voice to “the booming of war drums.” Ramirez, the casting director, watched archival footage of Grossman and saw a “bull in a china shop.” Both descriptions are consistent with Grossman’s reputation as a brash, savvy negotiator. Dylan signed with him between his first album, which focused on cover songs, and his second, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (1963), which established him as a great songwriter. One piece of color in the movie, Mangold said, was sourced directly from Dylan: “The whole little thing with him carrying that snub-nosed gun under his jacket comes from a story Bob told me about Grossman always being paranoid about some kind of ‘unfinished business’ he left behind when he worked in Chicago jazz clubs.”

Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz)

A folklorist and musicologist, Alan Lomax spent much of his life traveling with recording equipment to capture the songs and voices of folk musicians. Some, including Guthrie and the blues player Leadbelly, are well-known names; many more aren’t, which was part of the point. He was on the board of the Newport Folk Festival.

John Hammond (David Alan Basche)

“Hammond’s Folly” was Dylan’s nickname around Columbia Records after his first album was met with poor sales. Of course, John Hammond, the producer and talent scout who signed Dylan to Columbia (and produced that record), ultimately had the last laugh. Not that he needed it: Dylan or no Dylan, Hammond shaped generations of American music stars, fueling the careers of Billie Holiday, Bruce Springsteen and many others.

Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison)

A close friend of Dylan who was also his road manager for some time, the artist and musician Bob Neuwirth can be seen palling around with Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s tour documentary, “Dont Look Back.” He also worked with Janis Joplin.

Jesse Moffette (Big Bill Morganfield)

The blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield plays this fictional bluesman. Morganfield’s involvement has layers of historical resonance: His father was Muddy Waters, the Chicago blues pioneer. Not only was Waters a presence at Newport, but as a young man he was recorded performing in his Mississippi cabin by Lomax, who had gone there to record for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook)

Johnny Cash and Dylan were pen pals? Yes. A long-running friendship began when Cash exchanged letters with a young Dylan after listening to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” While working on “A Complete Unknown,” Mangold (who also directed the Cash biopic “Walk the Line”) asked Dylan’s manager about the notes. “He sent me scans of all these incredible letters that Johnny Cash wrote to Bob,” Mangold said. “And those are the words in the movie. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the letters Bob wrote to Johnny because Johnny probably never saved any of them — whereas Bob cherished them and kept them carefully.”

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