Real story of ‘twerp’ Bob Dylan’s romance with ‘Sylvie’ — what you don’t see in ‘A Complete Unknown’
nypost.comA Complete Unknown,” in which Golden Globes-nominated Timothée Chalamet plays a spot-on Dylan, Hollywood liberties are taken.
He didn’t first meet his hero Woody Guthrie, for the first time, at a New Jersey hospital and sing “Song to Woody” for him in the room.
He didn’t fall into bed with Joan Baez on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis.But the people in the movie are mostly real: Baez, manager Albert Grossman, Dylan’s mentor Pete Seeger.
And then there’s Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning, who is in at least half the scenes — serving as girlfriend, muse and even a teacher introducing him to New York City.In actuality, she was Suze Rotolo, the teenage Queens girl who is forever famously seen walking with Dylan on the cover of the album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” So why, when she was so prominent in his life and in the movie — which stretches from Dylan’s 1961 arrival in New York to him controversially going electric in ’65 — is Rotolo erased?Fanning told Rolling Stone that the name change was made at the request of Dylan himself, because Rotolo, who died in 2011, “[was a] very private person and didn’t ask for this life.”Yet, at least in later years, Rotolo was not quiet about her role in his story.
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