A Completely Unnecessary Movie
The 1960s as You Will Not Remember Them
Bob Dylan started out as Robert Zimmerman, turned himself into Woody Guthrie, decided to become Elvis and settled for god. If you think Bob Dylan has become a caricature of himself you will find nothing in the new Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” to disabuse you of that notion. Or if you don’t know anything about Dylan, by the end of the movie, you’ll know even less.
As far as you can tell from the movie, Dylan was initially inspired to write songs by Woody Guthrie. Fair enough. After that, he simply became a genius and completely original songs poured out of him, seemingly without external inspiration or influence. For example, you will be surprised that he wrote “Girl From The North Country” before he went to the United Kingdom and heard the original versions of that song. That is true genius. And what about those versions dating back to the 1700s? Maybe part of the great collective unconsciousness that Bob Franke used to talk about.
Even more puzzling is that, other than the Cuban missile crisis, the movie would leave you to believe that Dylan wrote such iconic songs “Master of War” and “With God on Our Side” without much noticing the Vietnam War and the dissent it inspired. Similarly, the Civil Rights movement is mentioned only in passing and it does not seem to relate to songs like “Blowing in the Wind” or “The Times They Are a Changin’”. The movie makes no note of Dylan’s trip to Mississippi with Pete Seeger or singing at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The music in the film is quite good. Timothée Chalamet, the Dylan character, does a good job of channeling Dylan with appropriate mannerisms and speech patterns. He’s more than credible singing Dylan songs, and in fact, in some ways sounds better than Dylan. But then I’m one of those folks who mostly think that Dylan songs are better when covered by other performers. Since Dylan is our foremost poet, it should be all about the lyrics, so it is frustrating when his lyrics are unintelligible as too often happens when Dylan sings them.
The Joan Baez character {Monica Barbaro} steals the spotlight doing an excellent version of the Phil Ochs’ song “There But For Fortune” which goes uncredited. Inadvertently the film thus demonstrates that Phil Ochs was every bit as good a songwriter as Dylan. The only Dylan song that surpasses “There But For Fortune” in the film is “Masters of War” Dylan’s angriest song. Strangely Ochs is never mentioned in the film despite being a close friend and sometime rival the duo often writing songs to try to outdo one another.
The movie does have some adult content and other than the inspiration of Woody Guthrie, having sex inspired Dylan to stay up all night writing new songs. Apparently that was more satisfying than the women he was with whom he mostly ignored.
Much of the movie focuses on a semi-fictionalized love triangle with Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo (who is the only real person in the film whose name is fictionalized) each alternately fawning over Dylan and then telling him what a jerky he is. At least they were half right. The music often seems incidental to the love stories until the big finish when Dylan goes electric at the 1965 Newport folk festival weirdly highlighted by the fight between Albert Grossman and Alan Lomax.
We are led to believe that prior to Dylan going electric at Newport, he was universally loved and his genius immediately recognized every place he went. Somehow overlooked is his first concert out of New York City at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs where Dave Van Ronk’s wife Terri Thal (Dylan’s actual first manager) called in a favor with Lena Spencer to get the booking. At the concert he was mostly ignored by the crowd. Apparently his genius didn’t yet extend to upstate New York.
We do learn some things, such as once you go from being a folk music star to a rock and roll celebrity you are suddenly surrounded by an entourage whose main job is to ask if you want an acoustic or electric guitar. We learn that in the ’60s that there’s an incredible amount of cigarette smoking, but apparently no drug use. The strongest drug involved is alcohol and although the Dylan character looks stoned much of the second half of the movie, there’s no hint that he actually takes drugs. As the saying goes, if you remember the ’60s you weren’t really there and apparently Dylan wasn’t.
While some of the fictionalized events can be chalked up to poetic license, the portrayal of Johnny Cash is a bizarre caricature – stoned, smashing cars and seemingly channeling Hollywood’s idea of a redneck country singer. Many Dylan fans will be surprised to learn that Johnny Cash played a key role with Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he went electric and that Bobby played Johnny’s guitar for the acoustic set. Another mystical event since Cash was not in Newport in 1965.
So go to the movie if you enjoy the music but if you want to know more about Dylan and the Sixties folk revival read a book by or about Suze Rotolo, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie because the music and the movements were about much more than Bob Dylan and acoustic versus electric guitars.
Ron Cooke is the author of a book of short stories and poems entitled Obituaries and Other Lies (available at Amazon); writes a well-received blog (ASSV4U.com/blog); and hosts a weekly radio show called Music They Don’t Want You to Hear on KTAL-LP in Las Cruces, NM. He is also a founding director of A Still Small Voice 4U, a not for profit supporting arts, culture and community that presents folk concerts, sponsors artists, festivals and community groups. Ron is an avid cyclist, racer, blogger, sculptor and ne’er-do-well.
A Completely Unnecessary Movie
The 1960s as You Will Not Remember Them