Yahoo Lifestyle Neil Young once threw Bob Dylan off his bus but loves “A Complete Unknown”
From one iconic singer-songwriter to another.
Frazer Harrison/Getty; Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures
Neil Young performs in 2015; Timothée Chalamet in 'A Complete Unknown'Bob Dylan gave his seal of approval to A Complete Unknown even before the biopic (which stars Timothée Chalamet as the iconic singer-songwriter) hit theaters. But now that it's out in the world, the movie can also be seen by Dylan's musical contemporaries. Neil Young is one, and he offered his positive thoughts about A Complete Unknown in a succinct, 59-word review on his personal website.
"I love Bob Dylan and his music. Always have. He's a great artist," Young wrote. "Once he was on my bus and I didn't recognize him and I threw him off but that's another story. This movie is a great tribute to his life and music. I think if you love Bob's music you should see this great movie. I loved it."
Directed by James Mangold, A Complete Unknown opens in 1961 with Chalamet's Dylan as a new arrival in New York City, checking in on his hospitalized hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). After Dylan's impromptu hospital performance impresses both Guthrie and fellow folk legend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), his career takes off. The movie follows him through the tumult of the early '60s, as Dylan writes songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" that become anthems of the civil rights movement, and up through the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan fatefully chooses electric rock music over the folk movement's lofty ideals of political activism.
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Unfortunately, A Complete Unknown skips over this anecdote from Young about kicking Dylan off his tour bus, but it is filled with lots of other little moments from Dylan's life and encounters with other musicians, both real and fictionalized. To name one example, Mangold told Entertainment Weekly that the aforementioned meeting with Guthrie and Seeger at the hospital was invented, though inspired by Dylan's admiration for his predecessors and a "beautiful object that Timothée found when he was doing research."
Young first made his musical breakthrough in the mid-'60s as a member of the folk rock group Buffalo Springfield, before breaking out as a solo artist on his own. Some of his most acclaimed albums, like After the Gold Rush and Harvest, combine elements of folk with rock and blues like Dylan did.
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