“A complete unknown” is the rare Hollywood film to have inspired a bill. Everywhere, on social media, in the mainstream media, or simply from as many people as have seen the film, there is a tingling conversation going on — a sort of collective meditation/investigation of who Bob Dylan where, who he is, what he meant then and what he means now. What’s striking is that very little of this is Dylan nostalgia—ie. the boomers become foggy with self-importance about “their” beloved icon. And if that’s what it was, it would be lame. (No one would hate that more than Dylan.)
The Dylan conversation that has ignited is very present and alive, and very exploratory. It’s about the movie, but it’s bigger than the movie. It’s about anyone who has seen “A Complete Unknown,” or anyone who simply grew up with Dylan, revisiting the question: What where that about him? What is his magic, his hold on us?
The reason it’s a question we’re still tossing around is because the answer is still mysterious. If you’re talking about the Beatles or the Stones (who together with Dylan make up the holy triumvirate of 60s music gods who changed everything), their majesty is infinite, but in an obvious way we can all feel what it was about. The Beatles did nothing less than recolor the DNA of the world; we hardly need to have them explained. The Stones have been referred to for decades as “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band,” and that kind of said it.
But Bob Dylan, from the moment he emerged, in 1961, had endless labels attached to him – protest singer, folk musician who “went electric” – that somehow fail to describe him and his place in the universe. It’s not that the labels are wrong. He started out as a protest singer; he went electric, and it was a game-changing, world-changing moment. But none of that, in a strange way, describes what is transcendent about Dylan. And what I love about “A Complete Unknown” — and what I think the film has been almost underrated in a way — is that it channels Dylan’s magic far beyond those pesky labels. It shows you that what was beautiful about him was something that cannot be put into words.
Many have noted that Dylan, who Timothée Chalamet plays him, is a deliberately mysterious and obscure figure, speaking in throwaway epigrams and dull cryptic asides. He’s not going to let what’s called conversation get him down. When Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who has become romantically involved with him, says, “You’re a fucking piece of shit, Bob,” that’s the dimension of him she’s referring to — that in addition to out-competing her, he’s making things up about his past (like saying he joined the circus) and refuse to police it, not even allowing his lover to pin down who he is. In “A Complete Unknown”, the Dylan we see is the original indie rock yeast who is too cool for school. You’d better believe that Lou Reed—the most infamous scumbag in rock’n’roll history—picked up huge chunks of that attitude from Dylan, along with the essence of Dylan’s swaying-back-and-forth talk-singing style.
But if Chalamet’s Dylan was just a hooded figure keeping his thoughts secret, it might seem like he was going all out for effect. Yes, he is kind of an asshole, but what solves it is that he doesn’t just appear as a gnomic enigma to the people around him. He is also a mystery to self — an artist who channels what’s going on around him but doesn’t really want to explain it, even to self. That would kill the mystery. When Bob talks about what Woody Guthrie meant to him in the film, the point is that Guthrie’s folk music touched this kid from Minnesota on a level beyond words and beyond explanation. What he heard in that music, and took from it, was original: not “protest” but something richer and deeper and more timeless. A template for faith.
And this is connected to how we experience Dylan’s songs in the film: as emanations of a spirit that makes him not only a great singer-songwriter but a forcea cosmic messenger. The message in his music is believe. That’s why his impulse to go electric is an act that the people, led by Pete Seeger, don’t understand. It’s not just that they prefer acoustic instruments. They believe in ideas: the struggle for social justice. Dylan does…and doesn’t. He believes in something more personal and impossible to say: the ability of a song to bring us into a state of awe, to lift you to heaven.
One reason the Dylan reckoning taking place now moves me is that it mirrors my own journey with Dylan. For too many years, everything I knew about him and learned about him hindered my ability to truly hear him. Growing up in the 70’s I had many of his records and listened to them dutifully, but somehow I always felt like something was missing. Simply put, I couldn’t understand most of the lyrics, and it made me feel like I was a C student in Dylanology. What did these streams of words mean? I realized that the “protest singer” label was one he had outgrown in a few years. But what he had never outgrown was how boomers lionized him as a “poet.” I never cared much for poetry; it doesn’t speak to me. And I felt that most of Dylan’s poetry sailed over my head.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I really began to hear Dylan and confront the great paradox about him: that his lyrics, much of the time, don’t matter that much. I mean, they do and they don’t. My favorite Dylan album is “Blood on the Tracks”, and there have been many days when I think the best Dylan song is “Tangled Up in Blue”. I have listened to it 1000 times. But I don’t understand 90 percent of the texts. It’s a song that might reflect the journey from innocence to counterculture to the world beyond, charting the journey of his marriage to Sara Lownds, but it’s also not about any of those things. The song is about feeling of it, to see the life you’ve lived come into view even as it recedes like a lost highway. And it’s right there in the sound of it.
What I connected with more as I got older is that Bob Dylan’s genius is all about sound. The quiet voice on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The ecstasy of the harmonica in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”. The way he doesn’t just sing a lyric – he sees it, and caresses and caresses it and puts it right into your soul, even when you don’t know what it means. And when he went electric, he achieved a sound – unique in the history of rock – that was sweet and furious at the same time. He lifted you up not like Woody Guthrie did but like JS Bach did. Whatever the subject happened to be, Dylan sang religious music. A heavy rain was about to fall, but the miracle was that Dylan had caught that rain and made the truth beautiful.
Music is sound, and what Timothée Chalamet captures, with his extraordinary lived impersonation of Dylan, is how Dylan used the sound of his voice, and the glittering percussive majesty of his guitar playing, and the mystery of his words as a way of touching on the uncanny, that in song after song creating a privileged five-minute space in the universe and inviting us to pour our feelings into that space. “A Complete Unknown” isn’t the greatest rock biopic (that would be “Sid and Nancy”), but it creates something unique in the world of rock biopics. It illuminates the sacred space that Dylan created, so that you can see it and hear it and touch it and live inside it, until you realize that it is life that is electric.
