Up to this point, there is barely a shred of truth in the story. Dylan discovered where Woody was from his 13-year-old son, Arlo, after he tracked down the family residence, and Pete Seeger was not in the room when Dylan visited him for the first time, or at any other time, as far as anyone knows. Dylan did not write “Song to Woody” until later; it was his first mature song. “Girl From the North Country,” too, was not written until later. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody put his finger on what is really going on with these elisions and evasions in his review of the film: “The principal maneuver, in these early scenes, is to emphasize the role of the veteran folksinger Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) in Bob’s first breakthroughs so that, when, in 1965, Bob ultimately adopts what Seeger has dismissively called ‘electrified instruments,’ the loss of his friendship registers all the more keenly as a price to be paid.”
In fact, Dylan’s success, which, in retrospect, came relatively quickly, was not as assured as the film makes out. In Dave Van Ronk’s autobiographical memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (edited and partly written after Van Ronk’s death by Elijah Wald, who also wrote the book Dylan Goes Electric, on which the film A Complete Unknown is partly based), Van Ronk says: “Looking back, what a lot of people don’t understand is that it was tough for Bobby at first. He was a new kid in town, and he had an especially abrasive voice, and no one had any way of knowing that he would eventually become BOB DYLAN—he was just a kid with an abrasive voice…. Bobby was doing guest sets wherever he could and backing people up on harmonica and suchlike, but there was no real work for him. He was cadging meals and sleeping on couches, pretty frequently mine.” It was Van Ronk, not Seeger, who piloted Dylan through the shoals of his initial career, but the film gives him virtually no credit. Yet the cover of one of the editions of Van Ronk’s memoir features the following quote from Dylan: “In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the streets, he reigned supreme.” (It is, however, probably better to be ignored completely than depicted as a lout and career failure, which is how the Coen brothers portrayed him in their 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis.)
Rolling Stone has performed the service of tabulating 27 different mis-directions in James Mangold’s film, some trivial, some more weighty. But after viewing it twice, and reflecting on its multiple discrepancies, I find myself doubting whether they really matter, given the overall trajectory of the work. They obviously haven’t mattered to Dylan, who reportedly recited the entirety of his parts in the script with the director. Clearly, he feels Mangold’s approach conveys the essence of that period of his career.
