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The Dictatorship

The new Bob Dylan biopic isn’t a history lesson. That’s OK.

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1 year ago

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The new Bob Dylan biopic isn’t a history lesson. That’s OK.

After a seemingly endlessthough occasionally hilariouspre-release media campaign, “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, is now in theaters. As with any biopic, there are questions about its historical accuracy — both from sincerely curious fans and from nitpicking diehards.

Pay the armchair historians no mind. Yes, the film gets whole swaths of the known story of Dylan’s early days in Greenwich Village wrong, but those gripes are largely irrelevant. Hollywood has long taken artistic license in portrayals of real-life characters; what matters is how a film does it. Director and co-writer James Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks may not always stay true to the literal facts, but they nail the look, feel and emotional and artistic arc of Dylan’s life in the early 1960s.

As the film mentions more than once, Dylan himself began his career by creating a biography from whole cloth.

Besides, when I interviewed Dylan in 2022, and asked him how he imagined a young artist might approach weeding through the infinite choices Spotify offers, he told me, “You’d have to limit yourself and create a framework.” With so much information, so many characters and so many diverging stories making up the early days of Dylan’s professional life, Mangold took essentially the same approach, to great effect. While some may quibble, it is, after all, just a movie, not a history lesson.

Elijah Wald, author of “Dylan Goes Electric!,” on which “A Complete Unknown” is based, says he’s untroubled with the artistic license that Mangold took with his work. “The book was optioned almost a decade ago, and was going to start production just as the pandemic kicked in,” Wald says, “but I think it really benefitted from that delay. It would have been a different film. The script would have been different. And Timothee wouldn’t have had those years of absorbing himself in Dylan’s music; of learning to play the guitar and harmonica. It would have been more an imitation, because he wouldn’t have been able to go so deep. All those things add up to a very different film.”

As the film mentions more than once, Dylan himself began his career by creating a biography from whole cloth, and he has continued to fast and loose with his life’s story throughout his career. For writers covering him, parsing fact from fiction has been a fun, if sometimes frustrating task. But thanks to the dogged work of numerous writers, historians and documentarians, the story of Dylan’s early years are pretty well known, including the film’s moment at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival when Dylan strapped on an electric guitar, simultaneously decimating the cultural importance of that gathering of folk purists and essentially inventing the modern rock star.

So why let the facts get in the way of great storytelling, especially if Mangold, Cocks, Chalamet and company capture the feel and the significance of the period so well?

“There were many people who were pivotal people in the Greenwich Village scene who are not there at all; important people like Phil Ochs, Glen Chandler and Tom Paxton, which I found really irritating,” says author David Browne, author of a new history of Greenwich Village’s bohemian music scene. “But wrapping the film up in an almost completely imagined relationship between Dylan and Pete Seeger — because it was easy to make Dylan a disrupter to the Pete Seegers of the world, even though he was just as disruptive to his contemporaries — as well as a love triangle, makes storytelling sense, and I wound up really liking the film.”

Where do you start if you want to know what really happened to Bob Dylan and his fellow folkies — almost all of whom are barely even mentioned in the film — and what led him to abandon the scene that had nurtured him so unceremoniously?

Why let the facts get in the way of great storytelling?

Wald’s own “Dylan Goes Electric!” is an obvious must-read. The narrative at the book’s heart, chronicling the parallel lives of Dylan and Pete Seeger, allowed Mangold to streamline the film’s narrative, dispensing with many of the Greenwich Village characters Dylan befriended (and often exploited) in favor of Seeger as Dylan’s mentor, foil and unwitting nemesis.

And while Dylan’s own 2004 memoir “Chronicles, Volume One” is replete with half-truths, quarter-truths and not-truths, his recollections of his days in Greenwich Village are gripping, detailed and full of characters and anecdotes that capture the time and place perhaps even better than “A Complete Unknown.”

A fantastic complimentary memoir to Dylan’s is artist Suze Rotolo’s “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties.” Rotolo was the model for the film’s Sylvie Russo — whose name and character were reportedly fictionalized at Dylan’s own request — but her relationship with Dylan was only a small part of a long and fascinating life. And while her book doesn’t ultimately paint the real-life Dylan in the most positive light, it gives amazing insight into his origin story.

Timothée Chalamet in
Timothée Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown.”Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures

As for the broader background from which Dylan sprung, the core of Browne’s book, “Talkin’ Greenwich Village,” revolves roughly around the period when Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary and eventually Dylan put the neighborhood on the map for young, aspiring East Coast musicians. Quite literally everyone who has been excised from Dylan’s story as told in “A Complete Unknown” — from artists like Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs to Dylan’s early patrons and managers like Carolyn Hester and Terri Thal — are present. And even those who do appear in one form or another in the film become fully realized figures in Browne’s book.

Finally, “Bob Dylan in America” by Sean Wilentz is a great choice for anyone looking for something meaty that places Dylan in the wider context of the culture and the times. Wilentz, who is both an esteemed historian and a true fan of Dylan, also digs deep into the artist’s early inspirations, from the Popular Front to the Beats, which are barely even hinted at in Mangold’s film.

Yes, “A Complete Unknown” may not be completely accurate. Like so many rock ’n’ roll biopics, though, its goal was not historical fidelity, but entertainment and the introduction of an important artist to a new generation. So break out the popcorn, damn the facts, and ask your local cinema to turn up the volume.

Jeff Slate

Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and journalist. His writing can be found at The New Yorker, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone, among others. He tweets at @jeffslate.

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The Dictatorship

Why Trump and other G7 leaders meeting without China might be a mistake

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5 hours ago

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June 15, 2026

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Why Trump and other G7 leaders meeting without China might be a mistake

PARIS (AP) — From the outset, China wasn’t included when major powers gathered in 1975 at a chateau outside Paris to fix the slumping global economy, the first of what have become annual summits by the G7 club of wealthy nations to forward their interests.

No surprise there. Imagining Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong brainstorming with U.S. President Gerald Ford and other leaders would have been unthinkable.

China was in turmoil, nowhere close to becoming the economic giant it is now. Mao had also helped defeat France and U.S. forces in Vietnam, by militarily supporting Ho Chi Minh’s communists that took power. So Mao would have been the odd man out had he been at the inaugural Rambouillet summit of six nations, growing into the G7 when Canada joined the following year.

But as U.S. President Donald Trump and his G7 counterparts gather again in France from Monday, China’s exclusion from the informal club’s summits also looks odd, given its now immense sway over the world’s economic well-being and affairs.

Put simply: Without China, does the G7 make sense?

Here’s a closer look:

By the numbers, China would be a shoo-in

If determined only by economic success, China would already be in the club.

Its economy, swollen by decades of growth since Mao’s death in 1976, now dwarfs those of G7 nations Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada — leaving only the United States to catch. By this measure, a G7 summit without China is arguably like a soccer World Cup without 5-time winner Brazil.

From being “only a tiny, benign, panda bear” in 1975, ”China has become a great global dragon,” says John Kirton, a University of Toronto specialist on the G7.

“So many understandably ask: Would the G7 and the global community be better off if China became a member of the G7 club? A plausible answer is ‘Yes.’”

But it’s only for democracies

A year ago, Trump mused about possibly expanding the club to include China, saying “ it’s not a bad idea ” when a journalist asked him.

But an unwritten G7 rule has always been that it’s only for democracies.

“We are each responsible for the government of an open, democratic society, dedicated to individual liberty and social advancement,” the founding leaders declared in Rambouillet in 1975.

China wouldn’t have cleared that bar then, during Mao’s rule that claimed many millions of lives through famine and revolutionary upheaval.

Nor, under President Xi Jinpingwould China do so now. By multiple measures, including the annual Freedom in the World study the World Press Freedom Index or the Canadian Fraser Institute’s ranking of economic freedom, China lags far behind G7 nations for civil liberties.

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China a priority subject for the G7

China’s clout impacts all G7 countries, in myriad ways. It sells far more goods than it buys, announcing a record trade surplus of almost $1.2 trillion in 2025, which is a source of friction with other industrial powers. It controls supplies of crucial rare minerals. Its technological advances and growing military strength are giving rivals cold sweats. And it is the world’s biggest emitter of climate-warming pollution.

All this means that China will be an elephant in the room at the Monday-to-Wednesday summit in the Alpine spa town of Evian-les-Bains.

As host, French President Emmanuel Macron has carved out time for the leaders to talk about how to rebalance trade with China, amid fears that soaring Chinese exports of cars and other products could wreck G7 industries.

The chemistry between Trump and other G7 leaders has been bad of late — over the Iran war and other bones of contention — but China could be an issue that unites them, said Cédric Dupont, who specializes in international politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

“They agree on the same thing, you know: China is a problem,” he said.

Beijing looking on warily

China’s Communist Party-led government has in the past criticized the G7’s exclusiveness and painted it as a relic of the Cold War when the world was more divided along ideological lines.

But in a statement to The Associated Press ahead of the Evian gathering, the Chinese Foreign Ministry took a more nuanced view, saying “the G7 should serve as a catalyst for solidarity and cooperation rather than an amplifier of division and confrontation.”

Beijing-based analyst Wang Zichen says that “Beijing is wary of the G7 because it sees the group as structurally aligned with U.S.-led Western power, and increasingly as a venue where China is discussed as a challenge or threat.”

But Chinese leaders cannot ignore it.

“China recognizes that the G7 still represents a very significant concentration of economic, technological, military and financial power,” said Wang.

China seen as a threat to G7 cohesion

Analysts say that admitting China into the club could wreck its cohesion, not only because Beijing’s authoritarian system of government, interests and its positions on Russia, Iran and other major issues don’t align with those of G7 democracies but also because its presence could test their long-standing alliances.

“China inside would indeed be a Trojan horse,” said Kirton. With a Chinese leader at the table, “individual members might be tempted to break G7 ranks to secure special favors from him on the economic, critical minerals, digital technology and other issues they address.”

Chris Alden, an international relations expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said that adding China “would make it very difficult for it to function.”

Russia’s example is also a barrier to China

The G7’s last expansion — accepting Russia as a member in 1998 — didn’t end well.

The club froze out Russian President Vladimir Putin when he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, foreshadowing the full-scale war now raging since 2022.

Trump said last year that excluding Russia “was a very big mistake.”

But Kirton said the experience convinced other leaders “that they should never take a chance on a less than fully democratic power becoming a full member of their fully democratic club again.”

___

Associated Press writers Ken Moritsugu and E. Eduardo Castillo in Beijing and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.

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The Dictatorship

U.S. and Iran say they have finally reached a deal, but details are still emerging

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8 hours ago

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June 15, 2026

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U.S. and Iran say they have finally reached a deal, but details are still emerging

Iran and the United States reached a deal Sunday aimed at ending the Middle East war, according to President Donald Trump and Tehran’s deputy foreign minister, marking a major breakthrough after months of conflict and on-again, off-again negotiations.

The statements from Trump and Tehran raised hopes for an end to fighting that has left more than 7,500 dead, most of them in Lebanon and Iran, and rocked the global oil market.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” Trump announced on Truth Social. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Oil prices fell in the hours following the announcement, with U.S. crude oil tumbling nearly 5%. Stock futures rose and Asian-Pacific stock markets traded higher Monday morning as investors appeared hopeful for a long-term peace deal.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed on Iranian state media that a deal had been reached and would be signed Friday in Switzerland. He said Iran’s agreement came after 14 hours of talks with mediators from Qatar.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose country has also worked as a mediator, announced on social media that “both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” where Israel has been battling the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.

“With the agreement now in place, mediators will facilitate a series of meetings this week,” Sharif said. “These pre-implementation discussions will lay the foundation for the technical talks and the official signing ceremony.”

The announcement comes after weeks of intensive negotiations mediated by regional partners after both sides had signaled in recent days that an agreement was close.

The memorandum is not a final peace treaty. Instead, it outlines commitments by both sides as negotiators work toward a broader agreement, establishing a framework for a 60-day negotiating period. That window is meant for U.S. and Iranian officials to resolve outstanding disputes and negotiate a more comprehensive agreement.

A senior administration official told reporters on a background call Friday that the framework includes commitments related to reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.

The proposed agreement, the senior administration official said, also calls for the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, with highly enriched nuclear material to be destroyed on-site by the U.S. and a guarantee of “long-term peace in the region.”

A senior Iranian officialhowever, told Reuters that the U.S. had agreed to allow Iran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium on Iranian soil under a final deal.

“I am somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said as news of the deal emerged Sunday.

The senior Trump administration official said the agreement would include Israel and Iran’s terror proxies — a notable element given that renewed attacks between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon on Sunday threatened to derail the deal entirely.

The war began Feb. 28 with joint U.S. and Israeli airstrikes that killed hundreds, including Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump and others in his administration repeatedly promised it would be over in weeks and that deals to pause the fighting were imminent, only to walk back those statements.

Early in the fighting, dozens of children died when an airstrike destroyed a school. Despite reports from within the U.S. intelligence community that American forces were likely responsible, and that faulty intelligence may have played a part, the Pentagon has yet to acknowledge that, saying only that it was under investigation.

As combat wore on, Iran repeatedly fired missiles and drones at U.S. allies in the region and attacked ships trying to transit the Straight of Hormuz. Israel bombarded Beirut and other areas and sent ground troops into southern Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah leadership.

As gas prices in the U.S. soared, Trump’s approval ratings plummeted, piling tension on his relationship with congressional Republicans, especially those up for re-election.

Expectations for a deal had risen in recent days as officials from the U.S. and Pakistan, which has been acting as a mediator, indicated that progress was being made behind the scenes.

Though the deal is set to be signed next Friday, Trump said over the weekend that he expected a deal would be signed Sunday, which he first declared on social media a day earlier. He also shared a post from Sharif — who has played a key mediating role — announcing that an agreement was expected to be finalized “in the next 24 hours.”

Iranian officials poured cold water on the expected deal up until the last minute. Citing state media, Reuters reported Saturday that Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denied that the memorandum of understanding would be signed Sunday, which also happened to be Trump’s 80th birthday.

“We will have to wait and see about ​the exact date of the signing of the memorandum of understanding, although it will not be tomorrow,” Baqaei said, according to Reuters.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.

Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.

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The Dictatorship

Cage fighting, anyone? Welcome to Trump’s 80th birthday party on the White House lawn.

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8 hours ago

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June 15, 2026

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President Donald Trump is celebrating his milestone 80th birthday on Sunday with a spectacle of men cage fighting on the White House South Lawn.

“UFC Freedom 250,” a series of invite-only mixed martial art fighting competitions that are part of the Trump administration’s year-long ‘America250’ celebrations, brought lots of fanfare, and plenty of controversy.

The president is marking his new status as an octogenarian alongside administration officials, donors and family, despite criticism of the event’s venue, along with its potential to financially benefit those involved.

Trump and his friend Dana White, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, have repeatedly claimed that the spectacle was only coincidentally timed with the president’s birthday. “It happens to be my birthday, but I didn’t do it for that reason,” Trump said. “‘Sir, we like the June 14 date.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my birthday,’” he recounted. “They didn’t know it, but they picked it.”

But Vice President JD Vance wished his boss a happy birthdaysaying, “Looking forward to celebrating later today at the UFC fight!”

“Happy Birthday to the GOAT,” Vance wrote in an X post.

Several members of the Trump family were spotted in Washington for the president’s birthday weekend, including his daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and granddaughter Kai Trump. First lady Melania Trump was also set to join the wrestling festivities on the South Lawn, according to a White House official. The president was slated to have dinner with his family before the birthday brawl, the White House said.

Notably, Kushner — a businessman with investments in the Middle East who is not currently employed by the administration — is playing an active role in negotiations to end the war with Iran, which Trump telegraphed he hoped would reach a new breakthrough on Sunday with the possible signing of a new negotiating framework.

The podcast and social media stars who were instrumental to Trump’s 2024 election victory, including Joe Rogan, came to Washington for the spectacle. Rogan, a longtime UFC commentator, previously criticized the decision to hold the fight outdoors because of potentially dangerous weather conditions — a prescient warning with rain, wind and thunderstorms in the forecast.

On Sunday afternoon, the White House said “rain or shine, we’re celebrating our great country no matter what” after The Weather Channel posted an ominous forecast on social media.

John Shahidi, a major content creator manager and Trump ally, was also expected to be in attendance, along with two NELK Boy members, the popular YouTube podcasters who backed then-candidate Trump in 2024, Kyle John Forgeard and Salim Sirur. John Fisher, a golf creator known as “Big John,” were in the mix, too, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

The presence of viral influencers is a reminder of the political capital the president’s team needs to restore ahead of the crucial 2026 midterms, given that the president’s approval ratings have sharply dropped in recent months. UFC’s most loyal fanbase — young men —are a critical voting bloc for the GOP, who have grown frustrated with the economy under Trump.

Rogan has repeatedly taken aim at Trump’s policies, including disagreement with Trump’s mass deportation campaign, tariffs and the war with Iran. Nonetheless, the host of the most-listened-to-podcast has remained in Trump’s orbitMS NOW previously reported, demonstrating the president’s acknowledgement of Rogan’s reach to his base.

Unlike typical 12-to-15 fight Ultimate Fighting Championship events, UFC Freedom 250 consists of only seven fights. Rather than taking place in a traditional indoor sports arena or stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada, the White House fight night was orchestrated underneath a 90-foot red, white and blue steel arch structure estimated to cost around $60 million. White has repeatedly insisted that the UFC — not taxpayers — are funding production costs.

MS NOW captured video on a jumbotron screen of “The Claw,” as it’s known, erected on the South Lawn. It was a compilation of imagery from the nation’s founding, civil rights protests, first responders at the scene of the 9/11 attacks, the first moon landing, boxing legend Muhammad Ali and UFC fighters in the ring — a nod to the United States’ 250th anniversary.

The imagery of the civil rights era, however, stands in stark contrast to efforts by the Trump administration to remove references to slavery or racial discrimination in museums and on federal websites. “Our fighting spirit is a living legacy of all who step forward when the moment demands,” a narrator says. “We’re a nation born of revolution, so fight is in our DNA.”

The Claw and its towering canopy and location drew fierce criticism from those who said it desecrates the historic building that represents the government’s executive branch. Critics also bemoaned the use of federal property, given Trump — whose financial disclosures showed he invested in UFC’s parent company in March — along with his allies, including Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is airing the fight, could profit from the extravaganza.

A federal judge on Friday denied an emergency request by a watchdog group to block the fights.

Lindsey Pipia contributed to this report.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.

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