Bob Dylan insisted his biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown,’ included a wholly inaccurate scene
The upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is set for release next month. Now, more information has emerged regarding Timothée Chalamet’s preparation for the role, and to what extent the musician himself was involved in the project.
According to director James Mangold, Dylan was heavily curious about who was helming the project and provided significant feedback on the script. Furthermore, He even suggested lines of dialogue that appear in the film.
Of the more substantial input Dylan provided, however, the most notable is his insistence that a completely false scene be included.
According to actor Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger in the movie, Dylan instructed Mangold to add the scene, though no one involved in the project is revealing which scene it is.
In an interview with Rolling Stone about the film, Norton recounted that Mangold was worried about adding an inaccurate scene at first due to how the audience might respond. According to the actor, Dylan replied, “What do you care what other people think?”
Norton felt that it was all just part of the singer’s long-time relationship with fame, saying, “[Dylan takes] an obvious pleasure in obfuscation and distortion.” He added, “He’s such a troublemaker.”
A Complete Unknown is set for release in the United States on December 25th, 2024, and on January 17th, 2025, in the United Kingdom.
Bob Dylan’s history of white lies
Whether he enjoys obscuring his past to play with his fans or genuinely wants to obscure the truth, Dylan has a history of spreading lies about himself. He spent years claiming that he was a child runaway who spent six years with a travelling circus when in reality, he grew up in a relatively comfortable working-class family in Minnesota without much to rebel against.
More broadly, his memoir, Chronicles, set Dylan experts into a tailspin of fact-checking, pointing out that much of what he’d written about his story was embellished or simply made up.
None of this should be particularly surprising. The singer has built a careful persona of mystery throughout his career and hasn’t tried to hide the fact that he enjoys the confusion it causes. In 1985, he spoke with biographer Mick Brown about the people he himself would like to interview. They included the Prophet Mohammed, the Apostle Paul, and Marilyn Monroe. “I’d like to interview people who died leaving an unresolved mess behind,” he said (via GQ). “And who left people for ages, to do nothing but speculate.”
No one should be surprised that the film will contain a healthy dose of “obfuscation and distortion,” especially given Dylan’s involvement. The title itself alludes to a lyric in one of his best-known songs, ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ in which he compares the person in the song to a drifter with a murky past. So perhaps we should all just be looking at the film as another opportunity for Dylan to quietly build his mystique and further obscure the man behind it.
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