Reflections on the Bob Dylan Biopic
A Complete Unknown is, in many respects, a remarkable film about Bob Dylan’s early career from 1961 to ’65. Based on a 2015 book by Elijah Wald entitled Dylan Goes Electric!, the movie provides good insight into the folk music culture of Greenwich Village in the early sixties, with appropriate attention given to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez. In addition, Dylan’s longtime manager, the appropriately named Albert Grossman, is accorded a bit of screen time and a few lines. Dylan’s original girlfriend, Suze Rotolo (called “Sylvie” in the film), is also prominent. Other key figures in Dylan’s early career, such as the beatnik folksinger Dave Von Ronk, are portrayed in the movie but never mentioned by name, as is Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary fame.
The lead actor, Timothee Chalamet, reportedly spent nearly six years prepping for the role, and the movie features numerous scenes of him playing and singing a la the music icon so convincingly that one presumes that even Dylan himself might approve. This is a rather daunting role. As John Jurgensen wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal Review, “Bob Dylan presents an especially tough multiple choice problem. He’s an artistic deity whose output made a real mark on history. He’s also a living cartoon character with… one of the most unique voices in American music.” To his credit, Chalamet nails it. A BBC review calls his performance “completely believable, better than the film itself.” I agree, as there are gaps in the script and the storyline that I wish had been filled. Nonetheless, it is a movie that anyone who wants to understand the impact of the popular culture of the sixties on subsequent American history should see.
Dylan was perhaps the 20th century’s most gifted songwriter and a riveting performer. Most anyone over fifty would know him for classic songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times, They Are A-changin’,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “My Back Pages,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and so many others that helped define the culture in the sixties – both for better and for otherwise.
However, Bob Dylan was more than a creative minstrel. He was also the consummate contrarian, an idiosyncratic narcissist, and an accomplished self-promoter. As an aloof and opaque abstraction who appeared in Greenwich Village in 1961 with a mythical/manufactured past, Dylan became the music industry’s equivalent of the actor James Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause – except that Dylan actually had a “Cause”: to transform himself into a superstar poet/singer/songwriter/ musician. But, unlike most wannabe stars, he also refused to totally surrender his soul – or perhaps more correctly, his ego – to the recording industry’s Machine. Almost from the outset, and especially after his obligatory debut album, he insisted upon retaining uninhibited freedom to produce any kind of music that turned him on. And despite their trendy socialistic pretensions, the elites who dominated the folk music establishment at the time were about as money-driven as the capitalist pigs who controlled the commercial music industry in general.
Subtly, the movie effectively portrays Dylan’s internal conflict between commitment to the hip “Cause” de jure – the liberal/left-wing socio/political agenda that included the civil rights, anti-war, and “social justice” movements of the early sixties – and his real passion: to become a music industry mega-star. The question is whether he was ever truly committed to the leftist “social justice” agenda, or did he merely exploit the folkie subculture to launch and advance his career?
In 1972 the leftwing agitator and country/folk singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald (of Country Joe & the Fish and “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die” fame) wrote a song about Richard Nixon called “Tricky Dicky of Yorba Linda” in which he described the President as an inauthentic “genuine plastic man.” According to this movie, the moniker might also apply to the public persona of Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota – a.k.a. “Bob Dylan.” What’s missing in the movie:
- How Dylan survived those first few months in NYC. He had no job and no apparent means of subsistence.
- No mention of Dylan’s influence on The Beatles – and vice-versa.
- No mention of Phil Ochs – for several years, his biggest rival in the topical/protest songwriting genre. Like Dylan’s relationship with virtually everyone else, his attitude toward Ochs was sometimes cordial (or at least tolerant) but oftentimes hostile, dismissive, and insulting.
- Perhaps most significantly, there is no mention of drugs and their impact on Dylan’s life and the music scene in general. Recall that one of his most memorable songs of the sixties was “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” in which he constantly recycles the theme, “Everybody must get stoned!” With that song alone, Dylan has considerable blood on his hands.
A Complete Unknown is rated ‘R’ language. There is no graphic sex but plenty of implied sex.
See this movie if you are historically curious about Dylan, the music industry, and the folk music scene in the early-to-mid sixties, culminating in his raucous and controversial appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he outraged the promoters and the folkies in the crowd by showing up with a rock band and playing “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Certainly, he has been a consequential figure not only in modern American popular music but also in modern American culture, as I wrote in a biographical profile on Dylan in 2005 entitled “No Direction Home – The Existential Journey of Bob Dylan”
In an October 2004 Newsweek cover story featuring excerpts from Bob Dylan’s newly-released autobiography, Chronicles, writer David Gates referred to Dylan rather matter-of-factly as “the most influential cultural figure now alive.” At first thought, it seems a rather startling and absurd claim for someone whom most people probably regard as irrelevant since the 1960s. Even in his prime, Dylan was nowhere near as popular as The Beatles, and over the past forty years, there have been many others who seemingly have been far more influential. So one’s first reaction is to dismiss David Gates as a hopeless Dylanophilic crank stuck in a sixties time warp.
But consider: if not, Dylan, then who? Who else has influenced popular culture and contemporary values more than he? Beginning with Elvis and the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-fifties, popular music became a potent cultural force in American life, and Dylan has been the premier songwriter and the single-most influential recording artist over the span of the rock age. Elvis was a voice but primarily an image, and that image is forever frozen in the 1950s. The Beatles dominated popular music in the sixties, and at the time, their influence seemed to dwarf Dylan’s, but over time, their exalted status has diminished. Relatively few study their music anymore, and stylistically, they were passé by the mid-seventies. Dylan’s influence, however, has not abated. To an unprecedented extent, he attracts far more attention from serious musicologists and other scholars than any other singer, songwriter, or recording artist of the 20th century.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Dylan changed songwriting and popular music forever. By fusing original, poetic lyrics with traditional acoustic folk music and, later, electronic rock, he transformed popular music from adolescent-oriented banal entertainment into an art form. By all accounts, he influenced The Beatles as much as they did him, and together, they permanently altered the popular music landscape. Over the course of a 40-year career, this enigmatic and erratic genius established himself as the most prolific and influential songwriter of the 20th century.
Bob Dylan was certainly a significant influence in the 1960s as he would later briefly be in the late-’70s and early-’80s when he identified as a born-again Christian. One wishes that would have defined the rest of his career – and, more importantly, the rest of his life – but unfortunately, it has not. Where his existential journey will end, God only knows. But along the way, thank God that his creative art was not limited to the themes of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” or “Lay, Lady, Lay,” but also to more edifying compositions such as “Forever Young,” “[You] Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Pressing On,” “Saved”, “Every Grain of Sand,” and “I Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody.” As in all of life, the challenge, the joy, and the ultimate satisfaction are to opt for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful over all the Lies, the Evil, and the Ugliness that we encounter along the way.
Bob Dylan, like virtually every pop culture/entertainment celebrity you’ve ever known, should be no one’s role model. But he was nonetheless significant – for the better but also, unfortunately, for the worse – for anyone who wants to truly understand American history over the past sixty years.
