A Complete Unknown (2024) directed by James Mangold (based on the book by Elijah Wald Dylan Goes Electric!) chronicles pivotal moments in Bob Dylan’s early career, particularly his transformation from folk singer to rock icon. Starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan the film captures the struggle of identity that comes with fame, and the pressure that puts on artistry, at a time of cultural upheaval and technological advances. If you haven't seen the film, maybe wait until you have to read this to avoid 'spoilers'.
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I first heard Bob Dylan when I was thirteen, right about the time I was picking up the guitar and learning chords. I was saturated with rock music, mostly from the 60s and 70s—songs with iconic guitar riffs—now considered older Classic Rock. While I enjoyed riff rock music, and the challenge of learning harder guitar parts, the music lacked a certain intimacy—a friendship with the artist. The teleportation to their energy was harder to access when there was a band and team of producers in the room.
Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, and others were intertwined with album designs, concepts, covers, photographers, and biographers—but with early Dylan, there was a gaping portal to the past through the nuance and quality of delivery. You can hear his half smile and sarcasm radiating. The vocal cracks, yelps, dusty guitar, harmonica, and on-his-own-time strums allowed me to peer into a world that belonged to me but that I never got to experience. Just like Dylan never got to experience the 30s America, he found the same through Woody Guthrie: he could live another life. Because of this inward-outward creative approach—where an artist is like a receptacle to culture and a mirror to the times—Guthrie's whole persona became synonymous with his era. His album, "Dust Bowl Ballads" (1940) is widely regarded as one of the first concept albums in music history, but his album-making was less show-biz than a concept record like Sgt. Pepper's which was more influenced by the Andy Warholian, post-modern view on art—where the audience were treated like voyeurs into a creative genius' world and the consumerism of it all widely impacted the end product.
Despite the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fiasco being caught up in its folk tradition, for me, it is more so about mourning a loss—the loss of a friend who isn't yet too defamiliarized via electricity, isn't yet too famous to talk. Cue one of the most cringe moments in the movie, when Dylan is sitting in the pub watching his friend play and a woman comes up to him pointing her finger and shouting, "That's f***ing Bob Dylan!" Few people achieve that status of fame, where being in public becomes a problem.
The Newport Folk Music Festival tried to cling to the art form of simplicity; singing and strumming as if it were a sacred zen dojo, or poets of the past with only a quill and ink. People of this school cannot deny that true artists must change with the times. Or, at least, they cannot pretend like the times are the same as they were a generation ago. The pop group as a vehicle for artists does complicate the message that folk offers—because intellectuality and an ear for a story must succumb to a more abstract notion—transcending through the noise of reality and embracing modernity for better or worse. It is easy to say in retrospect that their fears were needless because Dylan did not give up on telling stories when he went pop, but it was the fact that the stories themselves and the aesthetics they were delivered in were changing (and getting louder) for the new generation. Nowadays, pop artists can seemingly overcompensate and disregard what went before them, and we are all the poorer for it. In the case of Dylan going electric, the funny thing was that both sides of the argument were fighting about different things.
After watching A Complete Unknown I decided to reread Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory, first published in 1943, and republished with a foreword by Pete Seeger in the 70s—who is played by Edgar Norton in the film—I saw a detail that caught my eye. Guthrie writes his dialogue with heavy use of phonetic spelling, a practice considered dated and even offensive in certain cases because it can create a sense of characterization and stereotyping. And while I am not here to argue for its use (especially when portraying people outside one's identity) I do find it a fascinating literary tool and a powerful way to capture an audio byte via text. Writers of color like Frances E.W. Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison used phonetics to express the unique rhymes and rhythmic ways people actually speak.
When you listen to Dylan's first few albums, his voice is more fricative, stylized, more 'in-character' that is in communion with the Guthrie tradition—relaying the working class and vagabonds. Lens through the rasp. But while he needed to go down that road, he could not stay there forever, because it would soon become a bad imitation of itself. In some ways, once you leave the life you claim to depict—it cannot be authentically channeled into art. Dylan was from the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota raised in a middle-class Jewish family—though his singing voice often sounded more southern due to his folk influences. Nonetheless, he was now amongst cosmopolitan music professionals. His electric music would then portray the lifestyle and technology that he now had access to—while carrying that past whether he liked it or not.
A Complete Unknown addresses the identity crisis that was a result of the change, especially at the party scene. Bob says, ". . .each one wants me to be somebody else. . ." and he just wants to not be that. In a way, Dylan's enigmatic reaction to fame makes him one of the more relatable pop stars of the 60s. I talk about the Beatles' struggle with fame in this essay called Tedious Rooms of Hunger Artists which I wrote after seeing Get Back for the first time. To not know him in any sort of specific way, allows listeners to fill-in-the-gap with who they want him to be, and in turn, who they want to be. Dylan could not be the man with the answers, he was the one asking the questions. "Blowin' in the Wind", arguably his most famous song, acts as a symbol of everything he could not live up to. While he appeared at many political events, including one of the biggest protest marches of the decade (alongside Joan Baez) at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, he could not be an enduring spokesman for the political parties that tried to woo him. I found it interesting and relieved that the film didn't bother to show him wittily deflecting bad questions in the many interviews he gave in that era 1962-65.
Chalamet's vocal performance, which was mostly live-to-camera, was more solid than expected from the sneak-peak trailers that had been posted. Parts of "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" sound great, but some of his vowel articulations sound more modern than Guthrie-inspired, such as the way he pronounces rain in the climax, "It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall." No one but Dylan can sound exactly like Dylan—nor should one try to copy him exactly. There are times in the live performances, especially with Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro, where the actors take it more seriously than Bob and Joan did in real life, where they often missed cues, went off rhythm or sang out of tune. So, maybe they were a bit stiff or nervous in both cases—the filming of the movie and the actual concerts—but frankly, who wouldn't be? Though, the humorous moment where Dylan refuses to sing "Blowin' in the Wind" for the thousandth time scored some laughs in the audience, despite its absurd, borderline ChatGPT punchline, "This isn't one of those call-for-requests concerts. . . I'm gonna go backstage to see the Guitar Doctor." (Not the exact quote, but it was something cheesy like that).
The balance between Dylan's ability to be completely unhinged both privately and publicly and get stuff done in the studio was shown well. The work was put into this movie—down to the microphones and amps used in the studios, which made for a very warm and analog experience in the movie theater.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker said in his review that the materiality is severely lacking as if we needed to be reminded that people need money or else we won't believe the reality of the movie. What do you need to know exactly? That Bob slept on people's couches for a while like any creative in their early twenties?
Let's get material for a second then, shall we? Bob Dylan arrived in New York City in January 1961 with his friend Fred Underhill, whom he knew from his time in Minneapolis. Underhill was part of the University of Minnesota folk music scene and accompanied Dylan for part of the journey, though Dylan quickly began navigating the Greenwich Village folk community on his own.
After several months of couch surfing (with the help of people like Dave Van Ronk and others who are merely winked at in the film) and after getting signed to Columbia on October 26, 1961, Dylan could finally afford a small Greenwich Village apartment which is so beautifully rendered in A Complete Unknown—down to the feathers in the vases, paintings on the walls, coffee stains, and even a remake of his handmade marble coffee table.
New York in the 60s was as such: $1 an hour minimum wage, while it was $60 average for rent for a one-bedroom apartment.
The minimum wage income of $1/hour in the 1960s (working 40 hours a week) would equate to approximately $1,740.81 per month.
The average rent of $60 for a one-bedroom apartment in the 1960s would now be about $652.80 per month.
Woody Guthrie's book, "Bound For Glory" details how, when he was a teenager (in the 20s), he worked on farms for $5 a week for a while.
In the 1960s, $5 a week from the 1920s would be approximately $16.31 per week due to inflation. Note: Rent in the Village in the 20s might be as low as $15-30 per month.
On an annual scale:
$5 a week equals $260 per year (in 1920s).
Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $848.13 per year in the 1960s.
Adjusted for inflation, $5 per week in the 1920s would be approximately $177.46 per week today (2024).
The original $260 per year would now be about $9,227.69 per year.
One thing about being poor is the hours you have to put in just to live. While the rich make unimaginable profits. Unfortunately, things haven't become any easier for the lower classes— homelessness just hit an all-time high according to the New York Times.
If you are interested in more of the logistics, Dylan does a fine job in his memoir Chronicles. And while maybe a bit more scenes of him smoking a cig with his friends in a small apartment being goofy and talking about how expensive New York is getting would have been appreciated, instead of so many full tunes of music, I don't think that is a deal breaker. I would be curious to see a version of this film, with about half of the songs, and 50% more avant-garde / Jean Luc Goddard-style filmmaking. Alas, we will have to resort to clips like this outtake from Don't Look Back on YouTube, which thankfully exists.
The fact that Bob Dylan himself went over the script page-by-page with director James Mangold carries a lot of weight for me. The New Yorker complains that the movie takes too many historical liberties, especially about who he was dating by combining people into less number of characters for simplicity. I don't think being bogged down in the details of his personal relationships is that big of an oversight. If Dylan himself approved of it, then clearly we shouldn't be obsessed over it. I get that it is a slippery slope when you start to change history—that said, people shouldn't rely on biopics to get the history 100% correct. Biopics are a strange genre because they are not documentaries nor are they usually serious efforts in high film (with the exception of the perhaps greatest biopic of all-time: Beach Boys' Love & Mercy).
My final critique both disagrees with the New Yorker review and agrees—because Bob Dylan's music is so great, the movie has more wiggle room to be mediocre in other ways. The film shined in costume, mise-en-scene, acting, even most of the dialogue was Dylanesque and of the times. So what's there to complain about? Essentially it all comes down to pacing and overall focus on the 'fame' aspect instead of the actual spirit of Dylan—the weirdness in the poetry happening every night in the Gaslight and other coffeehouses throughout the village. Did the market research suggest that it needs to be more music focused and less weird or edgy? The early 60s are still processing the wild Beat poet era. Surrealism, mythology, Allen Ginsberg, Odetta, Van Ronk. Again, you can read about it all from Dylan himself in Chronicles.
Fun fact: The woman who yelled 'Judas!' occurred during Bob Dylan's concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England on May 17, 1966.
A Complete Unknown will surely introduce Dylan's music to new fans, and for that, I am very happy. But I think what longtime fans want to see is impossible to create. Maybe it will exist in a VR — New York City in the 60s video game. We don't need the JFK is assassinated on the black and white TV screen for the 1000th time.
Because there is so much spotlight music time, it was crucial that all of the performances were solid and interesting. Chalamet's hard work saved this film, as did the actors in the secondary roles in Seeger, Baez, and Cash, who all sounded wonderful.
Like I said, I have been a fan for a long time. Here is a picture of me ca 2009, sporting the polka dot shirt, sunglasses and the touf of curly hair, as well as the John Lennon Epiphone semi-hollow guitar. Of course, I had to pay homage to the Beatles too.
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