a comprehensive breakdown of A Complete Unknown and the relationship between Bob Dylan and cinema • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

During a gig at Gerde’s Folk City with Seeger, Dylan meets both Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and his eventual manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan describes first meeting with Grossman at the Gaslight Cafe, writing, “Whenever he came in, you couldn’t help but notice him. He looked like Sydney Greenstreet from The Maltese Falcon, had an enormous presence, dressed always in a conventional suit and tie, and he sat at a corner table. Usually when he talked, his voice was loud, like the booming of war drums. He didn’t talk so much as growl.” Dylan would also quote the iconic Bogart noir in several of his songs, from ‘Seeing the Real You at Last’ and ‘Tight Connection To My Heart’ to ‘City of Gold’ in which he sings, “There is a city of love, surrounded by stars and the powers above. Far from this world and the stuff dreams are made of.”

At the Riverside Church Hootenanny Special, a real gig Dylan played on July 29, 1961, he meets Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). After some heavy flirting, the two head out to see Picasso’s “Guernica,” when Dylan decides instead they should go check out Irving Rapper’s melodrama Now, Voyager, starring Bette Davis. Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, it gets its title from a Walt Whitman poem, much like Dylan’s ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ which borrows from Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself.’ In the film, Sylvie is inspired by Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who wrote in her book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties about taking Dylan to see “Guernica” and also that after they saw To Kill a Mockingbird she would sometimes call him Boo Radley, which made him laugh.

I can’t confirm whether they actually saw Now, Voyager together or not, but their discussion of the film afterwards ties nicely into Dylan’s ethos as an ever-changing chameleon. Sylvie describes the plot as Bette Davis’s character escaping her domineering mother to “find herself.” Dylan takes umbrage to this statement, retorting, “She didn’t find herself like herself was a missing shoe or something. She just made herself into something different.” Sylvie adds, “Something better.” Dylan insists, “Different.” Later, when their relationship is finally on its last legs, Dylan lights two cigarettes in his mouth, giving one to Sylvie, just as Paul Henried does for Bette Davis multiple times in Rapper’s film. Sylvie, as she parts from Dylan, quotes Davis’s final line, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars.”