Bob Dylan is a world-renowned laureate of literature and poetry who has created some of the most influential musical tracks of all time. His undeniable talent has inspired the creation of books and movies, most recently the film A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet.
This recently released film was well-told and very accurate. Unlike most other musical biopics, A Complete Unknown does not glorify the kind of person Bob Dylan is. Though he undeniably is one of the most talented singer-songwriters of all time and the creator of some of the most crucial, groundbreaking American albums (Highway 61 Revisited, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and Bringing It All Back Home, to name a few), Dylan wasn’t a perfect person. He is known for his mistreatment of his past girlfriends, has been criticized for not participating enough politically, and has generally been reported as audacious and ill-mannered. What especially stands out in the movie is his disrespect and disregard of two of his earlier relationships with Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo. However, the media seems to usually focus on Joan Baez’s bad experiences with Dylan (possibly due to her own fame) rather than anything about Suze Rotolo.
Suze Rotolo’s name was, per Dylan’s request, changed to Sylvia Russo in the film to protect her privacy. Most people might just know her as the woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but she was definitely more than that. She served as his muse and helped Dylan awake as an artist by introducing him to New York’s political, social, and art scenes. She was suspended from high school for spreading a “ban the bomb” petition and participated in the first civil rights march on Washington in 1958. Right after high school, she began working for the Congress of Racial Equality before Dylan had even really gotten involved with anything political. In fact, she is often credited as being the person who influenced Dylan to write the political songs that made him famous. Dylan told a biographer that he usually ran these political lyrics by Rotolo since “her father and her mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was.”
The two met in July of 1961 at the “Hootenanny” folk concert that was held at Riverside Church. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her… The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard,” said Dylan.
They grew close quickly and moved into the same apartment in the beginning of 1962. However, Dylan quickly rose to fame which grew stressful for Rotolo. She said that “he required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself. … I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth, and lies that living with Bob entailed.”
In the summer of the same year, she would leave to go on a six-month trip to study art in Italy that inspired Dylan’s songs “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” Upon her return, however, their relationship began to disintegrate due to her family’s blatant disapproval of the couple, difficulties with Dylan’s fame, and Dylan’s public affair with Joan Baez. “It had to end. She took one turn in the road and I took another,” said Bob Dylan in his memoir. In a 1964 entry out of one of Rotolo’s notebooks, she said, “I believe in [Bob’s] genius, he is an extraordinary writer but I don’t think of him as an honorable person. He doesn’t necessarily do the right thing. But where is it written that this must be so in order to do great work in the world?” This idea is one of the primary themes of A Complete Unknown.
One thing the movie doesn’t get right is Sylvie going with Dylan to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. This means that the scene where the two speak through a chain-link fence is purely fiction, but it does symbolize the growing divide created between them due to his rising fame. She would later be present at Dylan’s concert in Forest Hills that occurred a month later.
One thing the movie omits, however, is the key turning point in the pair’s relationship when Suze had an unplanned pregnancy with Bob’s child. They mutually agreed to have an abortion, but the emotional toll it took on her is thought to be the beginning of the end of their relationship.
Suze’s story is seemingly forgotten by most people, but it’s unfair to ignore what she went through and the kind of person she was. As explored in the movie A Complete Unknown, the media also shouldn’t glorify musicians who are objectively bad people, or that someone should be excused from facing the repercussions of being a substandard human being just because they’re famous. Nor should the people hurt by these celebrities, whether they are famous or not, be ignored the way Suze Rotolo still is today. Furthermore, Rotolo shouldn’t be viewed simply as Bob Dylan’s ex-girlfriend, but her own individual who excelled in her own ways.
