Perhaps fittingly given Bob Dylan’s history of obscuring and fabricating the details of his own past, James Mangold’s new biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown, takes a few historical liberties to create a smoother narrative out of some of the more chaotic details of the singer’s arrival in New York and rise to fame.

Indeed, some inaccuracies were reportedly added to the script at Dylan request, including that his girlfriend during the period Suze Rotolo not be named (Rotolo is instead depicted as ‘Sylvie Russo’), and while some Dylan fans might bristle at an audience member shouting ‘Judas!’ during his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (the fabled heckle happened at the Royal Albert Hall in May the following year), it’s hard to disagree that it adds to the drama of a climactic scene in which Dylan’s decision to perform electric causes an irreparable schism with the folk scene that nurtured him.

Speaking to MOJO last year, Mangold revealed how he would meet Dylan over coffee to discuss the script and how the singer approved of the tale the director wanted to tell.

“When I first met Bob one of the first things he said to me is, ‘What’s this movie about?’ And I said, ‘It’s about a guy who’s choking to death in Minnesota, who runs away to the big city, leaving behind all his friends and all he knew, reinvents himself, makes new friends, makes a new community, takes it over, and then starts to choke to death, and leaves.’ And Bob smiled at that. Because I feel like that is the story. And that intrigued me because I knew I could make a movie about that,” recalled Mangold.

“He asked to read the script, and that was the start of our connection. He liked what I was doing and saw that I didn’t have some kind of agenda.”

Despite some artistic licence taken here and there, the vast majority of the characters and faces we see on screen surrounding the young Dylan are depictions of real people, from music legends who need little introduction like Johnny Cash and Joan Baez, to blink and you’ll miss them appearances from lesser known players in Dylan’s story such as Bruce ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ Langhorne and future Pink Floyd/Nick Drake producer Joe Bod manning the sound desk at Newport.

To help separate fact from fiction, MOJO has uncovered the real-life story of every musician featured in the film and what happened to them after the dust had settled on Dylan’s seismic shift from folk to rock and roll…

Portrayed by: Edward Norton

A Complete Unknown director James Mangold plays with some of the facts surrounding Dylan’s relationship with the banjo-playing head of folk’s old guard. In reality the pair didn’t meet in Woodie Guthrie’s hospital room, but several months later in 1961 when the young singer was already making waves. Although thrilling, the scene where Dylan gatecrashes Seeger’s Rainbow Quest Decade television show is a complete fabrication (as is the hard-drinking Mississippi bluesman musician Jesse Moffette, who the pair perform with).

There was, however, a strong bond of mutual respect and admiration between the two. Seeger was generally enamoured with Dylan, who he saw as the great hope for the folk and old left movements for which Seeger had battled through the dark days of McCarthyism (as depicted to in the film, Seeger and his group The Weavers had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ‘50s). Dylan of course, had other ideas.

Seeger long maintained that the fabled story of him running around Newport ’65 with an axe trying to cut the power on Dylan’s electrified performance was a myth, however. “I was furious that the sound was so distorted that you could not hear a word that he was singing,” Seeger later claimed. “He was singing a great song, Maggie’s Farm, but you couldn’t hear it. I ran over to the sound man and said, ‘Fix the sound so they can understand him!’ And they hollered back ‘No, this is the way they want it!’… I was so mad, I said: ‘Man, if I had an axe I’d cut the cable right now. I really was that mad.”

He doesn’t say those lines in the film, but actor Edward Norton’s anxious glance at a line of axes during the climactic scene is a clear nod to the tale. Post-Newport, Seeger continued to man the barricades of political activism and caused controversy in 1968 when he appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour television show to sing anti-Lyndon B. Johnson song Waist Deep In The Big Muddy. He was a regular figure at anti-Vietnam war protests and benefits for the rest of the ‘60s and performed Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land with Bruce Springsteen at Barrack Obama’s inauguration weekend in 2009. Seeger passed away in 2014 aged 94, having recorded more than 100 albums.

Portrayed by: Monica Barbaro

Whether Dylan and Joan Baez consummated their relationship on the brink of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as we see in A Complete Unknown, has never been divulged by either party, but they did first meet at Gerde’s Folk City in 1960 where both were performing as shown in A Complete Unknown (in real life, Baez has recalled specifically going down to see up-and-coming Dylan with her then “very, very jealous boyfriend”).

Initially, Baez was a much bigger name than Dylan on the folk scene and, like Seeger and Van Ronk, did much to raise his profile, frequently inviting him on stage to perform with her. Their artistic appreciation for one another developed into a romance, yet as his star eclipsed hers, the relationship curdled.

Not depicted in the film is Dylan’s 1965 tour of England which he invited Baez to join him on. Baez had anticipated Dylan would invite her on stage, as she had so often done for him, but he did no such thing. For Baez – also unimpressed with Dylan’s growing interest in drugs and the hip rock and roll crowd – it was the death knell for their relationship. “I just sort of trotted around, wondering why Bob wouldn’t invite me onstage, feeling very sorry for myself, getting very neurotic and not having the brains to leave and go home,” Baez later told Rolling Stone.

However, the mutual appreciation between the two remained. Baez continued to perform and record Dylan’s songs (1968’s Any Day Now consisted entirely of Bob Dylan compositions) and she immortalised their relationship in 1975’s Diamonds And Rust. For his part, Dylan invited Baez to join the Rolling Thunder Review tour between 1975 and 1976.

Portrayed by: Scoot McNairy

Again, the story is tweaked for A Complete Unknown’s narrative, but Dylan really did frequently visit ailing singer Woodie Guthrie in hospital and play songs for him (although not, as far as anyone has reported, his own Song For Woody). Dylan hero-worshipped Guthrie, and it’s safe to say the dustbowl-era troubadour was the single biggest influence on his early career.

“I decided then and there to sing nothing but Guthrie songs,” wrote Dylan in his autobiography, Chronicles Volume One, of the first time he heard Guthrie’s music. “[Guthrie’s songs] were an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know, who I didn’t.”

One of the most important figures in American music in the first half of the 20^th Century, Guthrie was staying in Greystone Park Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey after being diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, during the scenes depicted in A Complete Unknown. As his condition deteriorated, he lost control of his muscles and speech and was transferred to different medical facilities, finally being moved to Creedmoor Psychiatric Centre in New York where he died in 1967 aged just 55.

After the period of self-imposed seclusion that followed his motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan made his first public appearance in almost two years at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert that took place at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968, performing Guthrie songs alongside Seeger and Guthrie’s son Arlo.

Portrayed by: Joe Tippett

Bear-like folk singer Dave Van Ronk only appears in two scenes in A Complete Unknown (Dylan’s arrival in New York and holding court at a party at the singer’s apartment) and isn’t directly named, but his presence is a key one. ‘The Mayor Of MacDougal Street’, Van Ronk was a central figure in the Greenwich Village folk scene Dylan walked into before quickly outgrowing.  “I copied some of his recordings phrase for phrase… I loved his style,” Dylan wrote of Van Ronk in Chronicles. “In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was the king of the street, he reigned supreme.”

Although the Brooklyn-born musician was the inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ titular, out-of-time folkie in 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, he had little truck with the folk purists who decried Dylan’s move towards rock. “Forty years later Bobby is still out there making music and they’re all dentists,” Van Ronk noted years later.

Other than being a vocal supporter and mentor for the young Dylan upon his arrival in New York, Van Ronk’s arrangements of traditional blues songs was a key early influence (it’s Van Ronk’s take on House Of The Rising Sun that Dylan used as a template for the version on his 1962 self-titled debut album). Unlike Dylan and Van Ronk’s other Café Wha? proteges like Tom Paxton, however, he was less interested in writing his own material (he didn’t release a full album of his own compositions until 1985’s Going Back To Brooklyn) and his general disregard for mainstream success, plus an aversion to travelling far from the Lower West Side of Manhattan, largely kept him a respected but cult figure as he continued to perform until his death in 2002. 1962’s Folksinger is an excellent introduction to Van Ronk’s visceral folk-blues hybrid and guitar playing.

Portrayed by: Dan Fogler

Played with glee by comic actor Dan Fogler, in A Complete Unknown Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman represents the hard-nosed, bread-grabbing greed of the music business in contrast to the loftier ideals of the left-leaning folk movement. It’s a characterisation hard to argue with. While it was customary for managers to take 15 per cent of their clients’ takings at the time, Grossman famously charged 25 per cent. “Every time you talk to me you’re ten per cent smarter than before,” he’s reported as saying. “So, I just add ten per cent on to what all the dummies charge for nothing.” Indeed, Dylan eventually parted ways with Grossman in 1970 largely due to the realisation that his manager had pocketed 50 per cent of his song publishing.

However, not only did Grossman facilitate Dylan’s rise to stardom, but he also did much to bring folk music as a whole to the wider public consciousness, assembling hugely successful trio Peter, Paul And Mary and representing an impressive roster that included Phil Ochs, Michael Bloomfield and Janis Joplin.

Grossman had a close relationship with Dylan throughout the ‘60s. Grossman’s wife Sally appeared alongside Dylan on the cover of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home (pictured above) and Dylan was en route to the couple’s home in Bearsville, near Woodstock, when he suffered the motorcycle accident that prompted his withdrawal from public life. After Joplin’s death in 1970, Grossman continued to manage Dylan’s former sidemen The Band. He died of a heart attack in 1986 aged 59.

Portrayed by: Boyd Holbrook

Director James Mangold had already brought the Man In Black to life on screen in 2005’s Walk The Line starring Joaquin Phoenix. Narcos actor Boyd Holbrook takes the role of Cash in A Complete Unknown and, in a film centred around Dylan’s relationships, Cash’s role is as one of his more reckless, loose-cannon cheerleaders. As Dorian Lynskey wrote in MOJO’s review of the film: “As Dylan and Seeger’s relationship curdles into that of an embarrassing dad and an eye-rolling teenager, Cash is the hip, indulgent stepdad.”

Another bond based on mutual admiration, Dylan and Cash’s friendship continued after the timeframe depicted in the biopic. The pair duetted on several songs during the sessions for 1969’s Nashville Skyline including Girl From The North Country and, later that year, Cash invited Dylan to appear on the first episode of The Johnny Cash show. After Cash’s death in 2003, Dylan paid tribute to the singer, calling him “the greatest of the greats.”

Portrayed by: Will Harrison

Acid-tongued folk singer Neuwirth served as Dylan’s confidant, consigliere, fixer and occasional road manager as he metamorphosised from apple-cheeked folk hero to amphetamine-fuelled hipster poet, a role you can also see play out in DA Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back (Neuwirth’s treatment of an increasingly insecure Baez on Dylan’s 1965 tour of Europe is particularly cruel).

 Neuwirth introduced Dylan to Warhol ‘superstar’ Edie Sedgwick that year, a relationship loosely depicted in 2006’s risible Factory Girl, and it’s Neuwirth you can see – or the bottom half of him at least – stood behind Dylan on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited (below). Increasingly, however, his role as Dylan’s hepcat lieutenant was taken by The Hawks/The Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, although Neuwirth was instrumental in helping organise the Rolling Thunder Review, hustling behind the scenes to recruit other artists including, ironically, Joan Baez.

Away from his time with Dylan, Neuwirth co-wrote Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz and taught her to play Kris Kristofferson’s Me And Bobby McGee, which became a posthumous number one hit. Though he recorded sporadically himself, Neuwirth’s self-titled 1974 debut released on Asylum is something of an unsung gem. He died in 2022.

Portrayed by: Eriko Hatsune

Toshi Seeger says only a few lines in A Complete Unknown, but Eriko Hatsune’s performance suggests Pete Seeger’s wife was one of the few people who saw the ruthless ambition burning away underneath young Bobby’s Huck Finn cap. 

Born in Munich in 1922, Toshi’s resumé as an activist and film-maker is as impressive as anyone of the era. Having moved to the US as a baby, she served on the New York State Council Of The Arts, marched with Martin Luther King, was instrumental in setting up the Newport Folk Festival and helped discover blues musician Mississippi John Hurt. Toshi is credited as the organisational brains behind her husband’s idealism. She produced his Rainbow Quest Decade television series and set up the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater environmental campaign to clean up the Hudson River near the pair’s home in Beacon, New York. She died in 2013.

Portrayed by: Norbert Leo Butz

A Complete Unknown’s depiction of Alan Lomax as a Luddite trad reactionary may be entertaining (“It’s the Newport Folk Festival, not the Teen Dream, Brill Building, Top 40, British Invasion Festival!” he bellows at Dylan prior to Newport ‘65), but is perhaps unfair to the folklorist and musicologist.

Lomax’s impact on popular music is incalculable. His field recordings of blues, gospel, bluegrass and Appalachian folk musicians taped in the ‘30s and ‘40s were sacred texts not only for folk singers like Dylan searching for authenticity, but blues-infatuated musicians across the Atlantic including The Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. Through his work, Lomax brought otherwise obscure musicians including Muddy Waters, Huddie Ledbetter, Jelly Roll Morton and Woodie Guthrie to a wider audience. 

Fiercely opposed to what he saw as the commercialisation of traditional music by the corporate music industry, he was a vocal critic of Dylan’s move away from folk (he did indeed once get into a fistfight with Albert Grossman) and had little time for the contemporary takes on the music he’d devoted his life to documenting (“the riptide of inauthentic shit” as he calls it on screen). After the ‘50s, Lomax turned his attentions to traditional European and Caribbean folk music and died in Florida in 2002 aged 87.

Portrayed by: David Alan Basche

Had he only signed Bob Dylan, John Hammond’s place in history would have been assured. However, the legendary A&R man/producer was also responsible for midwifing the careers of Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and many others.

As we see on screen, after first watching Dylan perform in Greenwich Village, Hammond instantly saw his potential and invited the young singer to audition for Columbia Records and produced his 1962 debut LP. Hard to imagine with hindsight, but it was considered a reckless move at the time, so much so that Dylan was initially referred to as “Hammond’s folly” within the company. Not for the first time, Hammond’s instincts were proved right, of course. 

By 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, however, Hammond had stepped back as Dylan’s producer and professionally the two had limited contact after then, though Dylan still credits Hammond with being the first person to really believe in him. After leaving Columbia in 1975, Hammond continued to work as a talent scout and signed guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983. He died in 1987 aged 76.

Portrayed by: Joshua Henry

A peripheral figure in A Complete Unknown (he appears briefly performing at the church hootenanny where Dylan meets soon-to-be girlfriend Sylvie Russo aka Suze Rotolo), Tennessee bluesman Brownie McGhee often shared bills with Dylan in Greenwich Village clubs and, as part of a musical partnership with Sonny Terry (also depicted in the film by Muddy Waters’ son, Big Bill Morganfield), played an important part in the young singer’s wider appreciation of blues and folk music.

Later in the decade, McGhee joined Dylan, Pete Seeger and others onstage during 1968’s Tribute To Woodie Guthrie. Outside of music, McGhee appeared in Steve Martin film The Jerk, Alan Parker’s Angel Heart and a 1988 episode of Family Ties playing fictional blues musician Eddie Dupre. Dylan would later mention McGhee, who died of stomach cancer in 1996, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2016.

Portrayed by: Eric Berryman

From the sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan onwards, a by turns amused and bemused-looking Tom Wilson is shown working the recording desk for Dylan’s sessions in A Complete Unknown.

After setting up jazz label Transition Records in the ‘50s and putting out records including Sun Ra’s first LP, the real-life Wilson became Columbia’s in-house producer.

He took over from John Hammond halfway through Freewheelin’… and served as Dylan’s producer for The Times They Are A-Changin’, Another Side Of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home and Like A Rolling Stone. He also produced Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album, signed Frank Zappa And The Mothers of Invention to Verve in 1966 and, despite Andy Warhol taking the official credit, to all intents and purposes produced 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. Speaking to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in 1969, Dylan conceded that rather than having this new rock and roll form sprung upon him, the producer had a specific sound in mind for Dylan’s change of direction ahead of recording. Wilson died of a heart attack in 1978 aged 47.

Portrayed by: Nick Pupo

Peter Yarrow’s role in A Complete Unknown, aside from being insulted by Alan Lomax, is largely as a representative of the more conservative folk movement, sitting in on the Newport Festival board meetings and looking increasingly anxious at Dylan’s career trajectory. In real life, Yarrow was a member of the clean-cut trio Peter, Paul And Mary, assembled by Grossman to sell folk music to a mainstream audience and responsible for popularising many of Dylan’s early songs such as Blowin’ In The Wind (although uncredited, bandmate Paul Stookey also appears). He also wrote Puff The Magic Dragon (adapting it from a 1959 poem by Lenny Lipton), which briefly plays as an altered Dylan stumbles around Greenwich at night with his shades on. Yarrow was convicted in 1970 of molesting a teenage girl and served three months in prison but was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981. He passed away in January 2025.

Portrayed by: Eli Brown

As he starts to chase down the thin, wild mercury sound he could hear in his head, Dylan is shown in A Complete Unknown yelling down the phone to Grossman demanding hot new guitarist (and fellow Grossman charge) Mike Bloomfield plays on his upcoming session because he wants musicians “with hair on their heads” as opposed to old guard sessionmen.

Virtuoso blues guitarist (“white blues guitarist” Alan Lomax acidly points out in the film) with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Bloomfield was a key component of Dylan’s new rock and roll sound, lending his searing blues lines to Like A Rolling Stone and the vast majority of Highway 61 Revisited, and was part of the band picked by Dylan to back him at Newport in 1965 alongside several of his PBBB bandmates who were also playing that weekend.

Bloomfield reportedly declined the offer to play on Blonde On Blonde as he felt his blues style wasn’t suitable for Dylan’s new songs and also spurned Dylan’s advances to be a part of his new touring band (The Hawks, later rechristened The Band, would instead take the gig). He continued instead to play with Butterfield until 1967, formed the short-lived Electric Flag with PBBB pianist Barry Goldberg (also depicted in the film by actor Justin Levine) and reunited with fellow Like A Rolling Stone alumnus Al Kooper for 1968’s successful Super Session and live sequel The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield And Al Kooper.

As a solo artist and guitarist, he continued to play with a host of names including Janis Joplin, Mother Earth, Duane Allman, Dr John, Taj Mahal and John Hammond Jnr, although his career in the ‘70s was hampered by his heroin addiction. Bloomfield sat in with Dylan at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre in 1980 and continued to perform around the West Coast before dying from an overdose of Valium in 1981 aged just 37.

Portrayed by: Charlie Tahan

The legend of how guitarist Al Kooper snuck his way onto the session for Like A Rolling Stone after Tom Wilson invited him to watch from the control room is a firm part of rock and roll folklore and Kooper is always keen to recount how he found himself adding the song’s distinctive Hammond organ part, despite never having played the instrument before. “Tom said, ‘You know that guy’s not an organ player, right?’ Kooper told MOJO in 2004. “Bob said, ‘I don’t care, just turn it up!’”

Something of a rock and roll Zelig, Kooper played French horn on The Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want, co-founded Blood Sweat & Tears and has played on countless records by artists including The Who, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King and Alice Cooper. Following Highway 61…  Kooper also played on Blonde On Blonde in 1966, and 1970’s Self Portrait and New Morning albums. In 1981 Kooper reunited with Dylan to play organ on tour with the singer and contributed to Empire Burlesque (1985), Knocked Out Loaded (1986) and Under The Red Sky (1990).

As a producer, Kooper recorded the first three Lynyrd Skynyrd albums and The Tubes’ self-titled 1975 debut among others. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

Portrayed by: Malick Koly

Even the most eagle-eyed of Dylanologists might have missed the brief appearance of Bruce ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ Langhorne in A Complete Unknown, were it not for actor Malick Koly’s telltale brandishing of a tambourine during the Bringing It All Back Home recording sessions. While Langhorne didn’t technically play a tambourine (it was actually a Turkish frame drum with bells attached), being the inspiration for one of Bob Dylan’s best-known songs would be reason enough for his place in history.

Born in Florida, guitarist Langhorne’s distinctive playing style was in part down to the fact that he blew off two of the fingertips on his right hand playing with firecrackers when he was a child. An in-demand session player, other than adding guitar to multiple Dylan tracks (his playing on Corrina, Corinna and Love Minus Zero/No Limit are particular highlights), he played with Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Judy Collins, Odetta and the two albums he recorded in the mid-‘60s with Richard and Mimi Fariña  – Celebrations For A Grey Day and Reflections In A Crystal Wind were highly influential.

Towards the end of the decade, Langhorne moved away from session work and focused on film scores where his sparse, understated take on Americana informed many other composers, particularly Ry Cooder, whose acclaimed soundtrack to Paris, Texas owes much to Langhorne’s work on The Hired Hand in particular.

“If you had Bruce playing with you,” Dylan once said, “that’s all you would need to do just about anything.”

Outside of his musical achievements, Langhorne founded the popular hot sauce company Brother Bru-Bru’s African Hot Sauce in 1992. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 2006, he died of kidney failure in 2017.

Portrayed by: Kayli Carter

Readers might know Maria Muldaur best for her 1973 hit Midnight At The Oasis, but the singer was a prominent figure on the Greenwich music scene in the early ‘60s, playing with future Lovin’ Spoonful singer John Sebastian among others, and was one of the few musicians on the circuit who was actually born and raised in the neighbourhood.

Although a non-speaking character in A Complete Unknown, serving mainly to add to the general Village milieu, Muldaur provides insightful contributions about Dylan’s early years and the reaction at Newport ‘65f in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home.

Portrayed by: Michael Chernus

A close friend of Pete Seeger, folk-singer, actor and activist Theodore Bikel was one of the co-founders of the Newport Folk Festival and – as depicted – tried to mediate/cool tensions when Dylan went electric at the festival in 1965.

Born in Vienna, Bikel’s family fled to Palestine after the Nazis’ annexation of Austria and alongside a long career in music (he recorded over 20 albums in 21 languages), he was an Oscar and Tony-nominated actor, appearing in both Hollywood films and Broadway musicals from the 1950s onwards. He created the role of Captain Von Trapp in the original production of the Sound Of Music (when Rogers and Hammerstein discovered Bikel was an accomplished folk singer, they wrote the song Edelweiss specifically for him) and performed the lead role of Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof during its long-running Broadway production over 2,000 times. He screen-tested for Auric Goldfinger in 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger and on television his CV includes appearances in Rawhide, Mission Impossible, Murder She Wrote, Knight Rider, Ironside and Columbo. Bikel was a committed political activist (Eleanor Roosevelt once gave him a lift from a production of The Sound Of Music to a Democrat Rally in the early ‘60s) and in 1977 Jimmy Carter appointed him to serve on the National Council for the Arts in 1977 for a six-year term.  He died in 2015 aged 91.

Portrayed by: Will Price

Producer Joe Boyd was the production manager at Newport in 1965 and is shown in A Complete Unknown arguing with Seeger over the sound desk. “The remarkable thing about that weekend,” Boyd recently recalled of Newport, “was that so many big historical events become hinges of history in retrospect, but this was one of those events that everybody saw coming and everybody was alert to and conscious of as it was happening.”

Boston-born Boyd moved to London in 1964 to set up Elektra’s UK offices, where he co-founded pivotal psychedelic club UFO, produced Pink Floyd’s debut single Arnold Layne and albums by The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Soft Machine, Richard Thompson, Nico’s Desertshore, Vashti Bunyan’s Just A Diamond Day, and Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. In the ‘80s he recorded R.E.M.’s Fables Of The Reconstruction (1985) and Billy Bragg’s Worker’s Playtime (1988). His memoir White Bicycles: Making Music In The ‘60s is a must-read for any fans of the era.

Portrayed by: Mark Whitfield Jr.

A respected blues and R&B drummer who played with Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf, by 1965 Sam Lay was touring and recording primarily with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and was part of the group who backed Dylan at Newport in 1965 alongside Jerome Arnold (played by Joshua Crumbley). Although uncredited on the album’s liner notes, he also took part in the sessions for the track Highway 61 Revisited. Although in the film we see Dylan buy the siren whistle heard at the start of the song from a New York street vendor, it has been reported that Lay (or possibly Kooper) was responsible for bringing it along to the session. Lay died in 2022 aged 86.

Portrayed by: P.J. Byrne

Manager, promotor and activist, Harold Leventhal was an influential figure on the folk scene in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He promoted Dylan’s first concert, at the Town Hall in New York City in April 1963, and managed Guthrie, Seeger, Bikel, Tom Paxton and more. Following Guthrie’s death in 1967, Leventhal took the singer’s son Arlo under his wing who worked in Leventhal’s offices before making his name with 1967’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. He died in 2005 aged 86.

Portrayed by: Jordan Goodsell

Engineer/producer Roy Halee was born into a musical family in Long Island, New York. His father, also named Roy, provided the singing voice for Mighty Mouse in the 1940s cartoon series. Depicted in A Complete Unknown at the mixing desk alongside Tom Wilson, Halee worked as an engineer on Like A Rolling Stone and Highway 61 Revisited, but is perhaps best known for producing Simon & Garfunkel. He’s namechecked on 1965 solo Simon track A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission) and won Grammy awards for his work on Simon & Garfunkel songs Mrs Robinson, Bridge Over Troubled Water and 1968 LP Bookends. After the duo split up, Halee continued to work with Simon, producing his first two solo LPs and accompanied the singer on the 1985 trip to South Africa which produced 16 million plus selling album Graceland.

Portrayed by: Ian Kagey

Bassist Harvey Brooks was among the musicians brought into the Highway 61… sessions as Dylan and producers Tom Wilson and Bob Johnston (the latter is not depicted in the film, presumably to avoid confusion with Wilson) looked for a more rock and roll-facing sound and briefly became a part of Dylan’s live band alongside The Hawks/Band members Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm. He joined Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield on various projects including 1968 Super Sessions, played on Mama Cass’s debut solo album Dream A Little Dream, The Doors’ The Soft Parade and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and Big Fun. He moved to Israel in 2009 and in 2020 released his first album of original material Elegant Geezer, Jerusalem Sessions.

Portrayed by: Malcolm Gold, Patrick Phalen and Douglas Marriner

The Tennessee Three (The Tennessee Two until the arrival of drummer W.S. Holland in 1960) were Johnny Cash’s backing band for almost 25 years, helping to create the distinctive freight train rhythm behind Cash’s songs. Guitarist Perkins and upright bassist Grant had worked in the same Memphis car dealership as Cash’s older brother Roy and would bring their instruments in when business was slow. When Cash returned from his posting in Germany with the US Air Force in 1954 they began playing together. At Cash’s first recording session for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records they had presented themselves as The Tennessee Three, but Phillips suggested billing them as Johnny Cash And The Tennessee Two. Prior to joining, Holland had drummed for country legend Carl Perkins. Cash guitarist Perkins died in 1968 from injuries sustained in a house fire, to be replaced by Bob Wootton. The Tennessee Three would back Cash until 1980, when Grant left to manage gospel country group The Statler Brothers, though Holland and Wootton continued to play with Cash until his death in 2003.

Portrayed by: Andre Chez Lewis

A highly sought-after session pianist, Paul Griffin was part of the New York circle of musicians known as ‘The A Team’ favoured by Phil Spector and Jerry Wexler. He played on hits by The Shirelles, Dion And The Belmonts and The Drifters before working with Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. He continued to record throughout the 60s and 70s playing on, among others, Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly and Steely Dan’s 1977 album Aja. He passed away in 2000.

Portrayed by: Felix Lemerle

New York singer songwriter Kenny Rankin appears briefly in A Complete Unknown during the sessions for Highway 61… for which he contributed guitar. A contemporary of Dylan in his Greenwich Village days, Rankin was noted for bringing a jazz influence into his interpretations, including his 1967 version of Mr Tambourine Man. His song Peaceful, from ‘67 debut album Mind-Dusters, because a hit for both Georgie Fame and Helen Reddy. He became close friends with the comedian George Carlin and would often open for Carlin on tour. He performed at Carlin’s funeral in 2008 and died from lung cancer the following year.

Portrayed by: Jimmy Caltrider

Drummer Bobby Gregg had played with Chuck Berry before Tom Wilson invited him in 1964 to help re-record an exploratory full band version of Dylan’s 1962 recording of House Of The Rising Sun in the wake of The Animals’ hit version. Gregg played on the ‘electric side’ of Bringing It All Back Home in 1965 and was invited back for the Like A Rolling Stone and Highway 61… sessions (it’s Gregg you can hear launching Like A Rolling Stone with a pistol-like crack of the snare drum). In November 1965, Gregg briefly joined Dylan’s backing band The Hawks following the departure of Levon Helm, before being replaced by Sandy Konikoff.