In spite of the film’s grand old-fashioned soap operetta segment, Cash played before Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) at the fateful 1964 Newport Folk Festival, on Friday, July 24. He was not sandwiched between the two headliners. Dylan, meanwhile, played July 26.

While the movie certainly makes an epic moment out of Cash presenting Dylan with his Martin acoustic guitar after the folk singer went electric and burned the proverbial house down at Newport, in reality he gifted it to him after a hotel-room jam in 1964. The gift was a country artist tradition, and each favored a wide range of Martin makes. Cash wasn’t at the Newport Festival in 1965. This detail is not even part of Dylan’s mythology. But now it is Hollywood legend.

Newport Folk Festival 1965 Was Not a Free-for-All Disaster

A Complete Unknown treats The Newport Folk Festival 1965 like the standoff in The Wild One (1953) with Dylan as the leather-jacketed, causeless rebel motorcycle rider. Like Marlon Brando before him. On Saturday, July 24, Dylan performed three acoustic songs, deciding to plug in for the festival closing. “On a whim, he said he wanted to play electric,” Newport roadie Jonathan Taplin remembers in Howard Sounes’ Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (2001). It was not, apparently, the premeditated assault on traditionalist sensibilities depicted onscreen.

Dylan was not the first electric act at the Newport Folk Festival either. Muddy Waters floored the audience with an electric guitar, and Cash’s band featured an electric lead guitarist at the festival in 1964. The controversy is, and has always been, overplayed. However, the altercation between Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), the steadfast keeper of traditional protest music, was reported, though the reaction was expected. Dylan’s new single was rising on the charts, and it was as electrifying as it was divisive.

Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was released in March 1965. Side one is backed by a tight rock band, side two features Dylan on acoustic guitar. On July 20, the six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone” dropped to critical acclaim, and uniformly accommodating radio station play. The 1965 Newport Folk Festival marked the first time Dylan performed the new hit in public—and the majority of the audience probably couldn’t wait to hear it live. The song is strong enough to work with just an acoustic guitar, but Bob really was giving his fans what they deserved.

For the July 25 closing, Dylan played his first concert with electric instruments. He was joined by pianist Barry Goldberg of the Electric Flag, bassist Jerome Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay, with two musicians who played on the radio smash: Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s Mike Bloomfield on lead electric guitar, and guitarist Al Kooper fingering the organ.