After a seemingly endless, if occasionally hilarious, pre-release media campaign, A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, is now in theaters. As with any biopic, there are questions about historical accuracy – both from genuinely curious fans and nitpicky die-hards.

Don’t bother with the armchair historians. Yes, the film misrepresents entire parts of the well-known story of Dylan’s early days in Greenwich Village, but these criticisms are largely irrelevant. Hollywood has long taken artistic liberties when portraying real-life characters; What matters is how a film does it. Director and co-writer James Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks may not always stay true to the literal facts, but they nail the look, feel and emotional and artistic arc of Dylan’s life in the early 1960s.

When I interviewed Dylan in 2022 and asked him how he imagined a young artist navigating the endless possibilities that Spotify offers, he also told me: “You would have to limit yourself and create a framework.” With so many With information, so many characters, and so many different stories that made up the early days of Dylan’s professional life, Mangold took essentially the same approach, to great effect. While some may argue, after all, this is just a movie and not a history lesson.

Elijah Wald, author of “Dylan Goes Electric!”, on which “A Complete Unknown” is based, says he has no issues with the artistic freedom Mangold took with his work. “The book was optioned almost a decade ago and was scheduled to begin production right around the time the pandemic hit,” says Wald, “but I think it really benefited from that delay.” It would be different became a film. The script would have been different. And Timothee wouldn’t have had the years to immerse himself in Dylan’s music; Learning to play the guitar and harmonica. It would have been more of an imitation because he wouldn’t have been able to penetrate that deeply. All of these things come together to make a completely different film.”

As the film mentions more than once, Dylan himself began his career by creating a biography of pure material, and he has continued to tell his life story throughout his career. For the writers who cover him, separating fact from fiction has been an entertaining, if sometimes frustrating, task. But thanks to the persistent work of numerous writers, historians and documentarians, the story of Dylan’s early years is quite well known, including the film’s moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan strapped on an electric guitar, simultaneously decimating the cultural significance of that gathering Folk purists and essentially the invention of the modern rock star.

So why let the facts get in the way of great storytelling, especially when Mangold, Cocks, Chalamet et al capture the feeling and meaning of the time so well?

“There were a lot of people who were key people in the Greenwich Village scene who aren’t there at all; “I found it really irritating,” says author David Browne, author of a new history of Greenwich Village’s bohemian music scene. “But I end the film with an almost entirely imaginary relationship between Dylan and Pete Seeger – because it was easy to make Dylan a nuisance to the Pete Seegers of the world, even though he was just as irritating to his contemporaries – and also…” Love triangle, makes sense in storytelling and I ended up really liking the film.”

Where do you start if you want to know what really happened to Bob Dylan and his compatriots – almost all of whom are barely mentioned in the film – and what made him abandon the scene that had so unceremoniously promoted him?

Wald’s own “Dylan Goes Electric!” is an obvious must-read. The book’s underlying narrative, chronicling the parallel lives of Dylan and Pete Seeger, allowed Mangold to streamline the film’s narrative and dispense with many of the Greenwich Village characters with whom Dylan befriended (and often exploited). , and instead take on Seeger as Dylan’s mentor, antagonist, and unwitting nemesis.

And while Dylan’s own 2004 memoir “Chronicles, Volume One” is full of half-truths, quarter-truths and non-truths, his memories of his days in Greenwich Village are gripping, detailed and full of characters and anecdotes that capture the time space perhaps even better than “A Completely Unknown.”

A fantastic addition to Dylan’s memoir is artist Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Rotolo was the model for Sylvie Russo in the film – whose name and character were reportedly fictionalized at Dylan’s own request – but her relationship with Dylan was only a small part of a long and fascinating life. And while her book doesn’t exactly portray Dylan in the most positive light in real life, it still provides amazing insights into his origin story.

As for the broader background from which Dylan emerged, the core of Browne’s book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village, revolves around the time when Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, and finally Dylan, became the neighborhood for young, upwardly mobile people made musicians from the East Coast famous. Literally, everyone who was cut from Dylan’s story as told in “A Complete Unknown” is present – from artists like Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs to Dylan’s early supporters and managers like Carolyn Hester and Terri Thal . And even those who appear in the film in one form or another become fully realized characters in Browne’s book.

Finally, Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America is a good choice for anyone looking for something meaty that places Dylan in the larger context of the culture and time. Wilentz, who is both a respected historian and a true Dylan fan, also delves deeply into the artist’s early inspirations, from the Popular Front to the Beats, which are barely hinted at in Mangold’s film.

Yes, “A Complete Unknown” may not be entirely accurate. However, like so many rock ‘n’ roll biopics, it wasn’t about historical fidelity, but rather about entertainment and introducing an important artist to a new generation. So get out the popcorn, curse the facts and ask your local cinema to turn up the volume.