In a 1997 interview with Newsweek, Bob Dylan said, “I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.” Anyone who has dabbled in Dylanology knows that part of the pleasure of being a Bob Dylan fan is how shrouded in mystery he remains. His enigma reaches far beyond just his personal life, plunging all the way into his art and beyond.

Dylan, of course, holds a special place in the movies himself. His songs have appeared on nearly a thousand soundtracks, including his Oscar-winning original number “Things Have Changed” from Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys and the titular song from Norman Jewison’s The Hurricane. Dylan has appeared in several documentaries and concert films including Don’t Look Back, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Hard to Handle: Bob Dylan in Concert, and his own picture Eat the Document, as well as fiction films such as Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Hearts of Fire, and Masked and Anonymous, which he co-wrote with director Larry Charles.

During a gig at Gerde’s Folk City with Seeger, Dylan meets both Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and his eventual manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan describes first meeting with Grossman at the Gaslight Cafe, writing, “Whenever he came in, you couldn’t help but notice him. He looked like Sydney Greenstreet from The Maltese Falcon, had an enormous presence, dressed always in a conventional suit and tie, and he sat at a corner table. Usually when he talked, his voice was loud, like the booming of war drums. He didn’t talk so much as growl.” Dylan would also quote the iconic Bogart noir in several of his songs, from ‘Seeing the Real You at Last’ and ‘Tight Connection To My Heart’ to ‘City of Gold’ in which he sings, “There is a city of love, surrounded by stars and the powers above. Far from this world and the stuff dreams are made of.”

At the Riverside Church Hootenanny Special, a real gig Dylan played on July 29, 1961, he meets Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). After some heavy flirting, the two head out to see Picasso’s “Guernica,” when Dylan decides instead they should go check out Irving Rapper’s melodrama Now, Voyager, starring Bette Davis. Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, it gets its title from a Walt Whitman poem, much like Dylan’s ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ which borrows from Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself.’ In the film, Sylvie is inspired by Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who wrote in her book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties about taking Dylan to see “Guernica” and also that after they saw To Kill a Mockingbird she would sometimes call him Boo Radley, which made him laugh.

I can’t confirm whether they actually saw Now, Voyager together or not, but their discussion of the film afterwards ties nicely into Dylan’s ethos as an ever-changing chameleon. Sylvie describes the plot as Bette Davis’s character escaping her domineering mother to “find herself.” Dylan takes umbrage to this statement, retorting, “She didn’t find herself like herself was a missing shoe or something. She just made herself into something different.” Sylvie adds, “Something better.” Dylan insists, “Different.” Later, when their relationship is finally on its last legs, Dylan lights two cigarettes in his mouth, giving one to Sylvie, just as Paul Henried does for Bette Davis multiple times in Rapper’s film. Sylvie, as she parts from Dylan, quotes Davis’s final line, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars.”

Another famous resident of the hotel, Edie Sedgwick, accidentally set her room on fire in 1967.  Sedgwick was the basis of Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams), the ex-girlfriend of Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) in I’m Not There. She was also portrayed by Sienna Miller in the 2006 biopic Factory Girl, with Hayden Christensen playing Billy Quinn, a character based on Dylan. Dylan allegedly wrote four songs about Sedgwick: ‘Just Like a Woman,’ ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,’ ‘Fourth Time Around’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ The Hotel Chelsea is now a New York City designated landmark and on the National of Historic Places, and has been the setting of dozens of films, including Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy and the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel.

When Sylvie returns from her school trip abroad, she appears in a photo session with Dylan for his next album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin believes the increase in topical and political lines in the lyrics on this album can be directly connected to the musician moving in with Rotolo, who came from a staunchly left-wing family. The cover photograph of Dylan and Rotolo walking down the middle of Jones Street in the West Village was shot just a few weeks after she returned from that trip, by CBS staff photographer Don Hunstein. The instantly iconic image was recreated by Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, as well as by Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg in I’m Not There and a solo Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis. The album can also be spotted in Jacques Rivette’s 1969 romantic drama L’Amour fou.

Shortly after appearing at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963, Chalamet’s Dylan receives a bag of fan mail, including a letter from Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) in which the Man in Black tells him that The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is his most prized possession. The two then continue an epistolary relationship throughout most of the film, culminating in back-to-back performances at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Cash was portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in Mangold’s 2005 feature Walk the Line. He received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, while his co-star Reese Witherspoon won the Best Actress award for her portrayal of June Carter Cash.

Dylan attends a fancy fundraiser cocktail party in Manhattan before embarking on a somewhat disastrous tour with Baez. In the background, eagle-eyed viewers will spy Allen Ginsberg darting in and out of the crowd. This is likely an homage to a similar scene in D. A. Pennebaker's Don’t Look Back, where after asking for a copy of Ginsberg’s poetry, in the next scene there is a fleeting shot of Dylan and Ginsberg conversing in Dylan’s crowded suite at London’s Savoy Hotel. Pennebaker later confirmed that nobody on the production had any idea that Ginsberg was going to be coming to London so soon after coming up in conversation. The controversial poet had, in fact, previously been in Prague, but was ejected by Czech authorities as a “corrupter of youth.”

Dylan’s picaresque feature Renaldo and Clara stretches back and forth through cinema history. Filmed prior to and during his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, the film mixes concert footage, documentary interviews and dramatic fictional vignettes. Among the performers featured are Ginsberg; Oscar-nominated Nashville star Ronee Blakley; powerhouse producer T Bone Burnett, known for his work on movie soundtracks like Walk the Line, Cold Mountain, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Crazy Heart and Inside Llewyn Davis; Woody Guthrie’s son Arlo Guthrie, who is perhaps best known for his song ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,’ which was adapted into Arthur Penn’s film Alice’s Restaurant; cult film icon Harry Dean Stanton; the Lady of the Canyon herself Joni Mitchell, whose song ‘Both Sides Now’ is the emotional heart of Christmas classic Love, Actually; an incredibly cheeky Joan Baez; and playwright and Oscar-nominated actor Sam Shepard. In fact, in his book The Rolling Thunder Logbook, Shepard—who wrote the script for Renaldo and Clara—shared that when he first met Dylan in New York City, the musician asked him if he had ever seen François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player or Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. When Shepard asked if that was the type of movie he wanted to make, Dylan replied, “Something like that.”

Footage from Renaldo and Clara is baked into Scorsese’s playful nondocumentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. The film also explores Dylan’s love of Children of Paradise, which inspired the thick white makeup he wears throughout the tour. Along with the imagery from Carné’s film, Dylan has quoted the French romantic drama in several of his songs. In ‘You’re a Big Girl Now,’ he sings, “Love is so simple, to quote a phrase.” In Carné’s picture, ill-fated mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault) repeats this line twice, first when describing how he turned away his great love Garance (Arletty), and then when they reconcile years later, just before being torn apart again by a large carnival crowd and the cruel hand of fate. In ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ the musician croons the lyrics, “Everything’s flowing all at the same time. I live on the boulevard of crime.” The first half of Carné’s epic is entitled Boulevard of Crime, which was the pejorative nickname of Boulevard du Temple, the Parisian location where venues like the film’s Funambules Theatre were situated.

The biggest through line in A Complete Unknown is Dylan’s relationship with Baez and his various appearances at the Newport Folk Festival. In I’m Not There, Baez is represented by Alice Fabian (played by Julianne Moore). Baez has been the subject of a handful of documentaries, including Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound and most recently Joan Baez: I Am a Noise. She also appears as herself in several Dylan projects, like Renaldo and Clara, Don’t Look Back, No Direction Home and Rolling Thunder Revue.

But the most clear cinematic inspirations for what Mangold delivers are two documentaries about the Newport Folk Festival by Murray Lerner. 1967’s Festival includes footage of performances by stars including Baez, Seeger, and of course Dylan, as well as interviews, conversations and behind-the-scenes footage filmed at the festival from ’63 to ’66. Along with glimpses of how Baez’s star power eclipsed that of Dylan during the ’63 fest, the film also offers viewers a peek into her radical politics. Four decades later, Lerner compiled his footage of just Dylan from those three festivals into a film called Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival - The Other Side of the Mirror, which crafts a singular look at the musician’s metamorphosis from folk singer to rock musician after his infamous electric set.

Back at the hotel after the set, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ plays on the radio as revelers dance by the pool. This song was specifically used as a demarcation between two eras in Tony Goldwyn’s underseen romance A Walk on the Moon. Set in the summer of 1969, Diane Lane and Liev Schreiber play Pearl and Marty Kantrowitz, a married couple going through growing pains, who spend their summer up in the Catskills at Dr. Fogler’s Bungalows. Their rebellious daughter Allison, played by Anna Paquin, has not been making things easier. A fan of Baez, she often cites the folk singer’s pleas for non-violence and antiwar protests as the reason behind her difficult behavior. Stuck at home one weekend, Marty attempts to understand his daughter by listening to Dylan’s famously dense song, but struggles when he is unable to dance to it.

A Complete Unknown ends as Dylan visits Guthrie one last time in his hospital room then rides off on a motorcycle, a pair of black sunglasses obscuring his expression as the iconic first notes of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ blare and the screen fades to black. The song has appeared on countless soundtracks including More American Graffiti, New York Stories, In the Name of the Father, and Curtis Hanson’s Lucky You. It also lent its name directly to a myriad of pictures, including the documentary Like a Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres, Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Like a Rolling Stone, and Yin Lichuan’s Like a Rolling Stone. Its lyrics also gave the titles to Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, and, of course, Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which brings it all back home.