In A Complete Unknown, Sylvie Russo is a fabrication—though that’s not such a concern in a film about the all-consuming force of legend. Played by a bright-eyed Elle Fanning in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, Sylvie is intended to represent the real-life woman who inspired much of Dylan’s early work, and who appeared clutching his arm on the famous cover photo for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: the artist and activist Suze Rotolo.
For all intents and purposes, Unknown’s Sylvie is Suze. She shares the latter’s left-wing politics; her immersion in the Greenwich Village scene in the 1960s; her love for (and frustration with) Dylan’s rising star. Mangold even depicts Sylvie meeting Dylan in the same manner the real Dylan met Rotolo, at a folk concert in a New York church. But unlike the other characters in the film, Sylvie is given a fictionalized name, through what was apparently a protective measure from Dylan himself.
In a Rolling Stone article published in November, Fanning revealed she’d been told that Dylan requested the character’s name change. Rotolo, who died of lung cancer in 2011, was “a very private person and didn’t ask for this life,” Fanning said. “She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.” She wasn’t, like Dylan and many of the other characters in Unknown, a public figure or a staple in the folk scene. As Fanning told me during an interview at the film’s New York premiere, “I was playing someone that wasn’t as well known as everyone else…She wasn’t a singer, and she didn’t play any instruments. So, for me, I wanted to really capture the relationship that [she had with Dylan]. It was kind of a roller-coaster of a relationship.”
That relationship is almost entirely what defines Sylvie in A Complete Unknown. Mangold provides reference to Rotolo’s work with the Civil Rights Movement and the Congress for Racial Equality, as well as her art studies in Italy, but they are used primarily as fodder for Dylan’s own growth and despair, not the illumination of Sylvie herself. We do not witness Sylvie’s life apart from Dylan, nor do we learn much of the “red diaper baby” childhood that inspired her trajectory. We don’t even learn of the illegal abortion Rotolo underwent after she’d discovered she was pregnant by Dylan. These are the sort of narrative choices I might normally chafe against, watching a woman’s story shrink under the sweep of male genius. But there’s an ironic redeeming quality to Sylvie’s minimization in this film: We, the audience, ultimately feel more aligned with her experience than we do Dylan’s.
Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning on the set of A Complete Unknown.
As Dylan, Timothée Chalamet gives A Complete Unknown its mesmerizing nucleus, but his performance doesn’t position the musician as a relatable hero. By the end of the film, Chalamet’s Dylan indeed remains an “unknown,” a man whose mythology has eclipsed his personhood. He is brilliant, but he is also opaque. So Mangold doesn’t pretend to answer the now infamous question of, who is Bob Dylan? Instead, it seems he asks, what is it like to experience greatness and be made small in its wake?
Sylvie operates as a proxy for the audience itself, a choice Mangold and Fanning apparently discussed as they were working on the film, according to an LA Times interview. The character experiences Dylan as a force; she witnesses his ascent with a mingling of pride, adoration, and fear. She grows exasperated with how little she knows about the man born Robert Zimmerman, only to realize she might understand him even less. She isn’t sure whether to worship or hate him, especially as his affair with fellow musician Joan Baez becomes increasingly apparent. But she remains transfixed by him, bowled over by the potent combination of young love and once-in-a-generation talent.
Eventually, there’s only so long that Sylvie is willing to sit and stare at the sun. She makes the choice to break off their relationship for a second time, telling Dylan she cannot settle for a life as one of the “spinning plates” he balances in his stage act. He does not want her to leave him alone; she cannot stay without losing herself to him entirely.
Dylan once wrote of meeting Rotolo for the first time, “She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen…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.” But Fanning’s performance makes it clear that Sylvie, i.e. Rotolo, struggled equally not to drown under the tide of that love. Although Dylan’s fight not to be boxed in (musically or otherwise) offers A Complete Unknown its narrative scaffolding, the emotions of the characters surrounding him—Sylvie included—offer audiences a tether outside the enigmatic Dylan himself.
After all, Rotolo helped shape him. She informed his early music; she nourished his early politics. Her influence is stamped across several of his most acclaimed tracks, such as “The Death of Emmett Till” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan himself told writer and biographer Robert Shelton that Rotolo knew “how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her: ‘Is this right?’ Because her father and her mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was.”
But it was only for so long that she could steer Dylan, who, as A Complete Unknown depicts, had both the talent and the need to carve a singular path. “He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself,” Rotolo wrote of their relationship in her memoir A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Elsewhere she wrote,“I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed. I was unable to find solo ground. I was on quicksand and very vulnerable.”
Dylan, too, wrote of his breakup with Rotolo in the song “Ballad in Plain D,” for which he sang, “Myself, for what I did, I cannot be excused/The changes I was going through can’t even be used/For the lies that I told her in hope not to lose/The could-be dream-lover of my lifetime.” The lies, the image, the legend—in combination, they were what made Dylan both a “beacon” and “a black hole,” or so Rotolo called him.
At one point in A Complete Unknown, Sylvie turns to Dylan in the apartment they share and pointedly asks, “Are you God, Bob?” To which Dylan replies, grinning, “How many times do I have to say this? Yes.” The interaction is played for laughs, but it’s a nevertheless revealing scene. Dylan’s self-mythologizing made him an icon, but it also worked to shroud him in mystique: an attractive quality in the divine, perhaps less so in a man. A Complete Unknown does not purport to reveal the real, comprehensible Bob Dylan. Nor does the film offer a full portrait of Suze Rotolo, channeled with reverence into Sylvie Russo. What it does is create a nexus of empathy. In showing us what it might have been like to witness a vision of glory—to feed and nurture it, only to realize it could not return the favor—we comprehend what Rotolo might have felt. And we respect why she had to leave.