On Hearing Bob Dylan For the First Time Again
A Review of "A Complete Unknown"

Timothée Chalamet stars in ‘A Perfect Stranger’ with Edward Norton and Elle Fanning. (AFP pic)
Bob Dylan has released 40 studio albums. Half of those came out before I was born, in early 1983. Describe me as an older millennial or a member of the so-called MTV generation — whichever way you cut it, even before I began seriously listening to music, Bob Dylan was old news. Establishment.
In high school I purchased a CD copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan out of a sense of responsibility to my own musical education, but it didn’t inspire me to acquire anything else in his discography. When there was so, so much music to learn and absorb from earlier decades, on the cusp of Y2K, “Blowin’ in the Wind” just didn’t inspire.
Some of my youthful negligence has since been corrected, largely through the influence of Dylan on other songwriters; time and time again I have learned that a new favorite song is, in fact, a Dylan cover. Todd Haynes’ 2007 film I’m Not There, with a soundtrack full of such covers, was particularly impactful. But my feelings towards Freewheelin’ remained mostly unchanged, and I couldn’t ever quite square what I read or heard about the importance of his music for the tumultuous era of social change that was the 1960s with my own experience of it in a post-Reagan world.
In spite of that, in January I went to see A Complete Unknown, the fictionalized Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet. I went in part wondering if the movie could do for me something similar to what I’m Not There had done, but also unsure what space was left for exploring the kaleidoscope of Dylan’s personas through the 60s after Haynes’ uniquely inventive film.
A Complete Unknown manages to make such space, largely by not trying to reimagine or “unmask” Dylan in his early years, but simply by shifting our focus. We don’t receive Dylan so much as we receive his context, both that of the broader historical moment as well as that of the relationships that influenced and propelled his early career.
There are few solo scenes — we aren’t subjected to endless images of Dylan penning lyrics or playing around with arrangements. Rather, in the movie’s first segment he meets his idol, Woody Guthrie, and befriends Pete Seeger. A few short scenes later, he has his first exchange with Joan Baez.
In many ways, it’s these characters who are the heart of the movie. The performances themselves are a major part of this: Ed Norton as Pete Seeger is reason alone to see it, and Monica Barbaro captivates as Joan Baez. We also see through each one different ways of engaging the music industry, audiences, and movements of the times, and how Dylan’s own conflict-causing approach propels us toward the final showdown of his first electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
By the film’s climax, Dylan has damaged his relationship with Baez (she discreetly gives him the finger as he waits to take the stage) and he breaks his friendship with Seeger, ignoring his mentor’s concerns about that now infamous set in Newport. Before the film is out, he goes to see Guthrie one last time, to say goodbye.
Director James Mangold captures these relationships and their progression through major historical events of the era (the Cuban Missile crisis, the March on Washington) on a small, intimate scale, but much of the major action happens when the camera pulls back and includes the fans and audiences, and it’s in these moments that A Complete Unknown can work a kind of magic.
The scene in which I became aware of this takes place when we see Dylan’s first performance of “The Times They Are A-Changing” at a festival. Switching between close-ups of Dylan onstage and wider shots of the crowd, the energy grows, the emotion of the entire audience slowly becoming palpable, until the belief in the words being sung are as present as all those people themselves. Right there — with social mores shifting, with the Civil Rights movement gaining ground — there, caught in the crowd’s reaction to Chalamet’s easy capturing of Dylan’s style — I finally understood what it might have felt like to hear those words when they were new, no longer the cliché they have become. There in the theater, I rubbed the corner of my eye; it was damp. I cannot be tearing up to an early Dylan song, I thought. Yet I was.
It was then I understood that I was listening more closely to these songs than I maybe ever had, due in large part to how much time Mangold allots for the music itself. The movie doesn’t rush through the music, but keeps it at its core, letting us sit with nearly full renditions of song after song, unlike the quick cutting of many modern music biopics. It’s in this choice that Mangold creates the conditions for what, until then, it seemed I had been missing: time and space for a genuine encounter with Dylan’s early songs.
There’s plenty more to be said about A Complete Unknown, especially by longtime fans and those with greater grasp of the historical minutiae that the film intentionally or unintentionally distorts (see, for instance, the list of errors compiled by *Rolling Stone).* But I’ll judge the film primarily by this fact: after arriving home from the theater that night, the first thing I did was queue up all of Dylan’s early albums — everything through Highway 61 Revisited — and sit down and listen, really listen, for the first time in years.
On Hearing Bob Dylan For the First Time Again
A Review of "A Complete Unknown"