“A Complete Unknown” is the rare Hollywood film that has inspired a reckoning. Everywhere, on social media, in mainstream media, or simply among those who have seen the film, a fascinating conversation is taking place – a sort of collective meditation/investigation into who Bob Dylan was, who he is, what he what he meant then and what he means now. What’s striking is that very little of this is Dylan nostalgia – that is, baby boomers being misty-eyed and self-righteous about “their” beloved icon. And if it did, it would suck. (No one would hate that more than Dylan.)
The conversation with Dylan that was heated is very present, tense and lively, and very exploratory. It’s about the movie, but it’s bigger than the movie. It’s about everyone who’s seen “A Complete Unknown,” or anyone who simply grew up with Dylan, taking a new look at the question: what is it? was is it about him? What is its magic, its hold on us?
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The reason this is a question we’re still pondering is because the answer is still mysterious. Whether we’re talking about the Beatles or the Stones (who, along with Dylan, constitute the sacred triumvirate of ’60s music gods who changed everything), their majesty is infinite, but in one 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 explain them. The Stones, for decades, were considered “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world,” and said so.
But Bob Dylan, since his appearance in 1961, has been assigned an infinite number of labels – protest singer, folk musician turned “electric” – which, in one way or another, fail to describe him. , as well as its place in the universe. It’s not that the labels are inaccurate. He started out as a protest singer; it went electric, and it was a game- and world-changing moment. But none of this, 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, in some ways, been almost undervalued – is that it channels Dylan’s magic way beyond of those pesky labels. This shows you that what was beautiful about him was something that cannot be expressed in words.
Many have noted that Dylan, as Timothée Chalamet plays him, is an intentionally mysterious and obscure character, who expresses himself through thrown epigrams and enigmatic, ironic asides. He’s not about to get caught up in this thing called conversation. When Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who was romantically involved with him, says, “You’re a bit of an asshole, Bob,” it’s this dimension of him she’s referring to: in addition to dismissing her from competitively, he will make up stuff about his past (like saying he joined the circus) and refuse to face it, not even allowing his lover to determine who he is. In “A Complete Unknown,” the Dylan we see is the original too-cool-for-school indie-rock asshole. You better believe that Lou Reed – the most infamous asshole in rock ‘n’ roll history – co-opted huge amounts of that attitude from Dylan, as well as the essence of Dylan’s sing-along style. Dylan.
Yet if Chalamet’s Dylan were just a hooded figure who kept his thoughts secret, it might seem like he was doing it all for effect. Yes, he East kind of an asshole, but what redeems that is that he doesn’t just come off as a gnomic enigma to the people around him. It is also a mystery for se — an artist who channels what is happening around him but doesn’t really want to explain it, even has se. That would kill the mystery. When Bob in the film talks about what Woody Guthrie meant to him, the fact is that Guthrie’s folk music touched this kid from Minnesota on a level beyond words and beyond explanation. What he heard in this music and what he took from it was essential: not “protest”, but something richer, deeper and more timeless. A model of faith.
And this ties into how we perceive Dylan’s songs in the film: as emanations of a spirit that makes him not only a great singer-songwriter but also a forcea cosmic messenger. The message of his music East faith. This is why his desire to go electric is an act that the folk people, led by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), do not understand. It’s not just that they prefer acoustic instruments. They believe in ideas: the fight for social justice. Dylan does…and doesn’t. He believes in something more personal and unspeakable: the ability of a song to usher you into a state of reverence, to lift you up to the heavens.
One of the reasons Dylan’s reckoning that’s unfolding right now resonates with me is that it mirrors my own journey with Dylan. For too many years, everything I knew and learned about him kept me from truly hearing him. Growing up in the 70s, I had a lot of his records and listened to them dutifully, but I always felt like I was missing something. Simply put, I couldn’t understand most of the lyrics, and it made me feel like a C student in Dylanology. What did these torrents of words do mean? I realized that he had outgrown the label of “protest singer” in a few years. But what he never got past was how baby boomers viewed him as a “poet.” I never really liked poetry; it doesn’t speak to me. And I felt like most of Dylan’s poetry was going over my head.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I began to really hear Dylan and confront his great paradox: that his words, most of the time, don’t matter 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 Dylan’s greatest song is “Tangled Up in Blue.” I’ve listened to it 1,000 times. But I don’t understand 90 percent of the lyrics. It’s a song that, perhaps, reflects the journey from innocence to counterculture and the world beyond, which traces the journey of his marriage to Sara Lownds, but it also isn’t about any of these things. The song is about feeling of this, of seeing the life you lived appear even as it recedes like a lost highway. And it’s exactly there, in the sound.
What I’ve come to realize more as I’ve gotten older is that Bob Dylan’s genius lies above all in the sound. The hushed rhythm of his voice on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The ecstasy of the harmonica solo in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”. The way he doesn’t just sing a lyric – he rocks it, brays and caresses it, and deposits it straight into your soul, even if you don’t know what it means. And when he went electric, he got a sound – unique in the history of rock – that was both soft and furious. He raised you not like Woody Guthrie, but like JS Bach. Whatever the subject, Dylan sang religious music. A heavy rain was about to fall, but the miracle was that Dylan had captured that rain and made the truth beautiful.
Music is sound, and what Chalamet captures, with his extraordinary lived-in Dylan impersonation, is the way Dylan used the sound of his voice, the shimmering percussive majesty of his guitar playing, and the mystery of his words as way to touch. strangeness, to carve out, song after song, a privileged five-minute space in the universe, and invite us to pour out our emotions there. “A Complete Unknown” is not the greatest rock biopic (that would be “Sid and Nancy”), but it brings something unique to the world of rock biopics. It illuminates the sacred space Dylan created, allowing you to see it, hear it, touch it and live within it, until you realize that it is life that is electric.
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