Bob Dylan is a folk music legend, known for his legendary lyrics and for winding his own mythos throughout his career, since the early 1960s.
With such a wide-spanning history and the songwriter always being the one to tell his stories, you would perhaps expect that he would want a lot of say in what did and did not go into his biopic A Complete Unknown.
However, he surprisingly stayed clear of meddling for the most part, according to the stars of the film.
The film stars Timothee Chalamet as Bob himself, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo — a pseudonym for a more private ex of Bob’s, Suze Rotolo.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Elle Fanning revealed that during a scene in which Bob and Sylvie are fighting, the songwriter stepped in to add his own line. She says: “It was something like, ‘Don’t even bother coming back,’
“We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something — or regretting something that he said to her.”
Speaking about his song Ballad In Plain D, which was written about Rotolo, Bob revealed back in 1985 that he didn’t look back on the song fondly. He said: “That one I look back and I say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that’.
“I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”
A Complete Unknown is released in UK Cinemas on January 17, 2025
