Bob Dylan’s relationship with the truth has always been a complex one. The recent biopic of his early career, A Complete Unknown, which I managed to see last weekend (and it’s brilliant, by the way, with Timothee Chalamet a perfect fit for the magnetic, contradictory central figure) doesn’t shy away from his revisionist, myth-making tendencies.

We first meet Bobby Dylan, as he introduces himself, arriving in New York. A self-styled rambling hobo who ran away to travel with a carnival and now intent on meeting his idol, Woody Guthrie, and establishing himself on the local folk circuit. It soon becomes apparent that the carnival backstory is invented, and that Dylan is really Robert Zimmerman with a comfortable middle-class upbringing in Minnosota. When challenged on lying about his past, Dylan points out that, ‘People make up their past; they remember what they want.’ Dylan’s need to reinvent himself is there from the beginning, and it's at the heart of the character we meet in the film.

Fame comes quickly, and everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Bob. He turns up at a party and has a guitar forced upon him; he goes to see a friend playing in a bar and is forced to flee after being recognised. At one point he complains ‘200 people in that room, and each of them wants me to be someone else.’ Bob became someone else many times in his life and career, always ready to zig when everyone wants him to keep on zagging. In retrospect, the real surprise about his decision to turn his back on the folk/protest scene to go electric is, perhaps, that people were surprised by it.

Bob’s repeated refusal to go along with what’s expected of him isn’t so much a sign of his being a contrarian as a refusal to be put into the box of others’ expectations. The film’s title doesn’t just refer to the Bob’s quickly lost anonymity, but perhaps to the fact that even while receiving widespread adoration and acclaim, the real Bob Dylan remained a complete unknown to his fans. The one they think they know is one that they are as guilty as him of constructing.

There’s a scene where we see Bob toiling at his craft, writing his classic song It’s Alright Ma. He struggles to find the right words to complete a couplet. ‘He not busy being born…’ before finally settling on the familiar line we all know, ‘…is busy dying’. I’ve seen a review which questions the credibility of this moment. Surely, said the reviewer, that’s not the point at which he gets stuck on the line. If he had ‘busy being born’, then ‘busy dying’ is the obvious counterpoint. If we’d seen him searching for the first half or the whole, it would have been more plausible, but not to get stuck halfway through. It’s a fair point, but I suspect the filmmaker wants to draw our attention to the line itself, arguably a pivotal one for understanding the character. Dylan constantly reinvents himself because if he isn’t still evolving, developing and changing, the alternative is to be dying, as an artist and as a person.

The supporting cast is excellent. Ed Norton is wonderful as Pete Seeger, coming across here as an idealistic, progressive Ned Flanders of the folk music world. Monica Barbaro makes a compelling Joan Baez, Dylan’s fellow leading light of the protest movement, sometime lover and the one most willing to challenge Bob’s tendency to be, as she puts it, an asshole (and that tendency, alongside his remarkable talent as a songwriter and magnetic performer, is an essential part of any truthful biopic of Bob). A personal thrill for me was the moment when Baez has Dylan join her in a duet of his song It Ain’t Me Babe. I’ve written before about how I used that song in Dead Man Singing, and it is put to similar effect here, offering a commentary on Bob's shortcomings in his personal life.

The other participant in Bob’s love triangle sees Elle Fanning play Sylvie Russo. Dylan fans may baulk at that name. Famously, Dylan’s then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo appeared with him in the cover photo for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album. Apparently, changing the name of the character in the film was at Dylan’s own request. No explanation has been offered publicly, but Rotolo – an artist and activist in her own right long after parting ways with Dylan – has commented in the past about struggling to shake off her association with Bob, saying that there’s more to her than being just a string on Bob Dylan’s guitar. Rotolo died in 2011, and I’d like to think that the name change is a goodwill gesture by Dylan, respecting her desire to distance herself from his story, although, as with all things Dylan, it’s left to us to figure it out for ourselves. In the 1980s, Dylan did comment on one of the songs he wrote after their breakup, Ballad in Plain D, saying that he regrets releasing it and that, ‘I must have been a real shmuck to write that.’ If you listen to the song (it's on the album Another Side of Bob Dylan), it's hard to disagree with him.

The renaming of Suze/Silvia isn’t the only time the film diverts from matters of historical record. Liberties are taken with the details of how Dylan met Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Neuwith and others, although the film is accurate in its portrayal of the significant parts each of them played in the early years of Bob’s career. Similarly, the circumstances of his romantic association with Joan Baez are tweaked, although the fact they were, for a time, a couple is true. Most significantly, the filmmakers transplant the famous ‘Judas’; ‘I don’t believe you’ exchange from Dylan’s show across the Atlantic at Manchester Free Trade Hall to his electric debut at the Newport Folk Festival. Many of the alterations – particularly that last one – could be argued to be historically false, but artistically true. There’s something very appropriate about taking that approach in a film about the greatest of 20th Century myth-makers.

A Complete Unknown is based on the excellent book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, which I read a few years ago and am currently re-reading since seeing the film. If you’re interested in unpicking some of the truths from the cinematic blurring, it’s highly recommended.