What “A Complete Unknown” gets right about Bob Dylan

Eeverything, As Charles Péguy said, it begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Unless you’re Bob Dylan. If you’re Bob Dylan, you start political and go mystical. You start out as a hobo apprentice, singing songs of change; They become, in protest, the prescribed and prophetic mouthpiece for a sense of mass unrest otherwise known as the 1960s. and then, after a few violent gestures and farewell speeches, one withdraws. You dematerialize; You drop everything and drift into the depths of the self. Where you stay until you get a Nobel Prize.

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James Mangolds A complete unknownlike all the best films about rock stars –Sid and Nancy, Bohemian Rhapsody, control– is a fairy tale. It requires liberties: Dylanologists will scream. It dramatizes, mythicizes, eliminates, elasticizes and throws sparkling, magical showbiz confetti over the period between Dylan’s completely unannounced arrival in New York in 1961 and his honking, aggressive “I won’t work on Maggie’s Farm” followed by another four years later Headlining performance at the Newport Folk Festival, where his new electric sound drove the old folkies crazy and the crowd (at least in Mangold’s film) screamed for it his blood.

Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan, and he does it very well, with a kind of amnesiac intensity: he sniffs, twitches, murmurs, invents things, as if he were the young Robert Zimmerman, in the ferocity of his attempt to shed his past and become Bob Dylan has temporarily cauterized his own personality. Ed Norton, his high forehead beaming with benevolence, plays Pete Seeger, the father figure of the folk activist Dylan will betray. Scoot McNairy, in an astonishing wordless performance, plays Woody Guthrie, immobilized by Huntington’s disease at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. Dylan makes a pilgrimage to Greystone with his guitar and rummages through a beautiful, eerie bedside version of “Song to Woody”:

How did he do that? How did this nobody from nowhere, at the age of 20, manage to simultaneously sound like the creaking religious past and the howling approaching future? It wasn’t his musicality: as a guitarist he was burly and street-level, and his God-fearing harmonica playing now sounds like some kind of weird punctuation, the harmonica less a musical instrument than a place to put your face after recital, one in particular jagged line. But his young, old voice, with its jolts and streaks and its unrelenting edge, was a vehicle to assert itself: the world would have to wait until John Lydon of the Sex Pistols heard another voice so crystallized with frozen anger.

And when his words or his visions reached the climax of a nightmare –I saw a room full of men with hammers bleeding– he didn’t sound frightened, but excited, as if he were about to receive a quick and joyful vindication. Musician Robyn Hitchcock, listening to Dylan while imprisoned in an English boarding school, felt full revelation. As he describes it in his recent memoirs, 1967Dylan seemed to have “opened up (or created?) a world outside of morality, belief, rules or superstition: (He had) found the sad, doomed kingdom where things just are there – with no apparent purpose – and that Residents unhappy waiting for them.” Fate.”

One of young Dylan’s fundamental lies as he skulked and stuttered through Greenwich Village was that he had learned his singing craft while traveling with a carnival. This is important because I’m beginning to suspect that there may be a major divide in American life The The main division is between carnivals and non-carnivals; that is, between those who instinctively – sometimes animalistically – understand that life is theater, that people believe what they want and that all essential things happen in fantasy, and… everyone else. Showmen don’t have much respect for reality because they know they can bend it and overturn it. Non-carnivals are condemned to the facts—to what Stanley Elkin called the “plodding sequiturs.”

Was young Bob a showman? He wanted to be, and compared to the brave and kind, high-minded Seeger, he certainly was. His identity was an achievement. His writing was skillful. He thrilled and amazed his own audience. And when, in A complete unknownHe tries out the carnival story on Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro) and adds a cowboy guitarist named Wigglefoot, she looks at him and says – excitingly deadpan – “You’re so full of shit.” That’s exactly what one says to a showman.

And it was all very theatrical, very exaggerated, the way they praised him and crowned him and made him the voice of a generation. (Don’t all contemporary covers of his songs today – with the exception of Hendrix’s smoking “All Along the Watchtower” – sound like misunderstandings, mistranslations?) The seriousness and humorlessness of the folkies were incredible. He had come to save us all. The line would be unbroken: from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan, the torch had been passed.

But if you were Bob Dylan, there would be no torch and no one to pass it to anyway. So he had to be perverted and disruptive and ungrateful and electrified and make a noise that would terrify poor old Seeger: punk rock before the letter. A complete unknown makes Alan Lomax a special villain, which is interesting: the venerable activist and archivist becomes a brutal enforcer in the film, cursing Dylan for his impurity and arguing with his manager Albert Grossman during the set in Newport.

In the Newport scenes, where the crowd roars in despair, the film really creates a sophisticated mix of events. History records that Lomax actually argued with Grossman. But no one in Newport shouted “Judas!” to Bob Dylan: that didn’t happen until the following year, when he performed at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England. And Ian Bell in his Once Upon a Time: The Life of Bob Dylanpoints out that most festival-goers in Newport – a hip crowd, after all – would have known what to expect from Dylan that day: “‘Maggie’s Farm’, supposedly the main cause of all the trouble in Newport, is no secret and either “A surprise to anyone with the slightest interest in Dylan at the start of the festival.” (Dylan’s keyboardist Al Kooper said that “85 to 90 percent” of the audience enjoyed the Dylan performance.)

But what now? A complete unknown is a film, and a film – or a film like this, which is, in a sense, a parable of artistic recklessness – needs a climax. And Bob Dylan, more than most rock stars, is a myth. In the truest sense of the word. He invented himself, he disappeared himself, and in doing so he became a lens: rays of otherworldly insight streamed through him, and he aimed them at us like someone frying ants with a magnifying glass.

He had dazzling visions and torture chambers in his head; he could get God and Abraham to talk to each other like two hustlers on a street corner; He abandoned everyone, abandoned everyone, and then taught them how to rejoice in that abandonment. Something inside me wants to talk about the heavy rain that is falling right now and wonder who will stand up to sing over it: who will be our singer of the end times? our leading, unintelligible voice; and so forth. But to ask such a question – to think in such terms – is making a big mistake, isn’t it? And here Bob Dylan’s lesson ends.

This article appears in the January 2025 Print edition with the headline “Bob Dylan’s Carnival Act”. If you purchase a book through a link on this page, we will receive a commission. Thank you for the support The Atlantic.