Sylvie Russo in 'A Complete Unknown' is based on Bob Dylan's former girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Here's what their relationship was like in real life.
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- In the new Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo.
- The character is a renamed version of Dylan's former girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
- They dated in the early '60s, and Rotolo appeared on the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."
Elle Fanning's Sylvie Russo plays a key role in the new Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," acting as the main romantic interest, artistic muse, and down-to-earth foil to TimotheΓ© Chalamet's mysterious musical genius.
She's also the only character who was given a name different than her real-life counterpart, in this case Suze Rotolo, the artist, political activist, and eventual author who died in 2011 from lung cancer.
Rotolo met Dylan in the early 1960s shortly after he moved to New York City, where Rotolo was working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They quickly fell in love and moved in together in Greenwich Village.
Director James Mangold confirmed to Rolling Stone that Fanning's character Sylvie Russo is meant to closely resemble the real Rotolo, rather than be a "half-Suze, half-fictional" creation.
"It was a character who I felt β and I think Bob very much agreed when we talked early on β was the only one who wasn't a celebrity and an icon in and of themselves with a kind of public persona," Mangold said. "Everyone else is up for the gauntlet and has been in that game a long time. And Suze was just a real person."
"In many ways," he added, "Elle plays our access point or more normal kind of citizen, if you will, among all these eccentric characters. She's much more like someone we know."
According to Fanning, Dylan asked Mangold not to use Rotolo's real name, because she was "a very private person and didn't ask for this life."
"She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob," Fanning said in a separate Rolling Stone interview.
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The movie accurately depicts the couple's first meeting in 1961 at a Riverside Church hootenanny, per Rolling Stone. At the time, Dylan was 20, while Rotolo was 17.
"Right from the start I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen," Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One."
"She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves," he continued. "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."
In Dylan's recollection, Rotolo was embedded in the New York art scene as a painter, illustrator, and graphic designer, in addition to her work with civil rights committees. She'd grown up in Queens, he said, and was raised in a "left-wing family." It's been reported that both her parents were members of the American Communist Party.
"Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of '1001 Arabian Nights.' She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness β a Rodin sculpture come to life," Dylan wrote. "She reminded me of a libertine heroine. She was just my type."
Not long after their first encounter, Dylan said he ran into Rotolo's sister, Carla, and asked if he could see Rotolo again.
"She said, 'Oh, she'd like to see you, too,'" he recalled. "Eventually we got to be pretty inseparable. Outside of my music, being with her seemed to be the main point in my life."
By early 1962, Dylan and Rotolo had moved in together, even though her family disapproved. (Dylan described Rotolo's mother, Mary, as "very protective" and disapproving of Dylan's "nameless way of life." Rotolo's father, Gioachino, died when Rotolo was 14.)
Rotolo had a major impact on Dylan's artistic taste and political views
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In his memoir, Dylan said he began to broaden his horizons once Rotolo entered his life. She loaned him poetry books, introduced him to works by Arthur Rimbaud and Bertolt Brecht, and took him to local hang-out spots for artists and painters. He was particularly fond of off-Broadway productions and local museums.
"A new world of art was opening up my mind," Dylan wrote.
"A Complete Unknown" also correctly notes that Rotolo inspired Dylan to write topical songs, including "The Death of Emmett Till" and "Oxford Town."
"A lot of what I gave him was a look at how the other half lived β left-wing things that he didn't know," Rotolo told writer David Hajdu in his book "Positively 4th Street."
"He knew about Woody [Guthrie] and Pete Seeger, but I was working for CORE and went on youth marches for civil rights, and all that was new to him," she explained. "It was in the air, but it was new to him."
After the commercial failure of Dylan's self-titled debut album, he pivoted from folk covers to writing his own songs, influenced by Rotolo's poetry and his expanding political awareness. These formed the bedrock of his 1963 sophomore album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." Rotolo cemented herself in music history by posing with Dylan for the cover art, the pair walking arm-in-arm down Jones Street.
In her 2008 memoir, "A Freewheelin' Time," Rotolo said the album cover was beloved for its "casual down-home spontaneity," which was unusual for the "perfectly posed" trends of the time. She said it embodied the image of "rebellion against the status quo."
"The songs had something to say," she wrote. "It was folk music, but it was really rock and roll."
Before 'A Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' was finished, Rotolo went to study art in Europe, leaving Dylan heartbroken in New York
In the summer of 1962, Rotolo left New York to study art at the University of Perugia in Italy. ("A Complete Unknown" shows Russo leaving for 12 weeks. In real life, she was gone for six months.)
Dylan channeled his lovelorn yearning into songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," a much-celebrated highlight on his sophomore album; "Down the Highway," which includes a lyric about his lover taking his heart "away to Italy;" and "Boots of Spanish Leather," later included on his third album, 1964's "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"
The couple shot the album cover for "A Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" after Rotolo returned in January 1963. But their romantic relationship wouldn't last much longer.
As both parties recalled, Dylan's fast-growing fame eroded their trust and intimacy. Rotolo also said she took issue with Dylan's "paranoia and secrecy."
In "A Complete Unknown," the couple fight about Dylan's reluctance to discuss his pre-New York life in the Midwest. Russo specifically needles him about changing his name, which matches the recollections in Rotolo's memoir; she'd found out that Dylan's real name was Robert Allen Zimmerman when his draft card fell out of his wallet. "It was suddenly upsetting that he hadn't been open with me," she wrote. "I was hurt."
"People make up their past, Sylvie," Dylan counters in the movie. "They remember what they want. They forget the rest."
According to Fanning, Dylan himself added a line to the screenplay for the fight scene, which takes place before Russo leaves for Italy.
"It was something like, 'Don't even bother coming back,'" Fanning told Rolling Stone. "We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something β or regretting something that he said to her."
Even after they stopped living together, Rotolo said she and Dylan still spent time together
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In August 1963, Rotolo moved out of their shared apartment on West 4th Street to live with her sister instead.
"I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth, and lies that living with Bob entailed," Rotolo wrote in her memoir. "I was unable to find solid ground β I was on quicksand and very vulnerable."
Shortly after, Rotolo discovered she was pregnant and had an illegal abortion, which she said sent her into a depression. At the same time, Dylan's rumored affair with Joan Baez (Rotolo described him as "a lying shit of a guy with women, an adept juggler") and his long-simmering tension with Rotolo's family ("For her parasite sister, I had no respect," Dylan sings in "Ballad in Plain D," a song he later said was a mistake to release) put strain on their relationship.
However, the young couple continued to spend time together β or, as Rotolo put it in her book, they were "caught in the whirlpool of indecision that is tortured young love." She also described their connection as an "addiction."
Though Rotolo said they'd "ostensibly broken up" by late 1963, Dylan regularly visited Rotolo's apartment and called whenever he was out of town. Still, she felt increasingly suffocated by Dylan's mystique and the worship of his fans. She feared people were only nice to her to get close to him and, she wrote, lost a sense of herself in the process.
"It wasn't easy; even when broken, the bond between lovers tends to hold in unpredictable ways," Rotolo wrote. "But I knew I was not suited for his life. I could never be the woman behind the great man."
It's unclear exactly when the couple cut ties for good, but sometime in 1963 or 1964, Rotolo realized she had to walk away. Dylan agreed, she wrote, with a "resigned sadness."
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In 1965, ahead of Dylan's spring tour in England, Rotolo said she got a call from his manager about updating her passport.
"This was another cue for me to sever another tie," she wrote. "Slowly untying all those entanglements. I said thank you but no."
In "A Complete Unknown," Russo is present for the climactic event: Dylan's electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
In real life, Rotolo wasn't there to see Dylan enrage his friends and fans with rock music; Dylan was already living at the Chelsea Hotel with his future wife, Sara Lownds, by the time he performed at the festival in July 1965. Lownds was also pregnant with their son, Jesse.
"During our time together things became very complicated because so much happened to him so fast," Rotolo wrote in her memoir. "We had a good time, but also a hard time, as a young couple in love."
Dylan's memoir includes a similarly enigmatic description of their breakup.
"The alliance between Suze and me didn't turn out exactly to be a holiday in the woods," he wrote. "Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop. It had to end. She took one turn in the road and I took another. We just passed out of each others' lives."
