'It Could Even Be Like a Myth'

Brief thoughts inspired by A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan walking down Princes Street in 1966

Ever since its announcement, A Complete Unknown was always an irritation to me. What more could filmically be added to Bob Dylan’s legend? His most iconic period was the subject of one of the first music documentaries, DONT LOOK BACK, and there already exists a perfectly fitting biopic, I’m Not There, with a delightfully puckish turn from Cate Blanchett inhabiting his svelte wild mercury era. To stave off the inevitable onslaught of inquiries asking if I had seen it yet from friends, all too familiar with my longtime Dylan obsession, I booked in to the first IMAX screening on release day with trepidation.

Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has always carefully curated his life story, perhaps one of the first artists aware that it was a fiction that one could cannily shape one’s self. It is easy to see why he was on board with I’m Not There with its six actors playing different facets of his shapeshifting persona: the train hopping hobo, the modernist poet, the American outlaw alongside the more recognisable avatars of his musical career. The biopic format seemed an oddly conventional choice but in the viewing came to make sense: by weaving these well-worn tales of his life into one origin story, it is now being concretised into myth.

To a Dylan anorak like myself, there is a certain thrill seeing some of these anecdotes given the Hollywood treatment, from his bedside visit to Woody Guthrie and even more minor episodes like Al Kooper’s audacious first-time Wurlitzer organ turn during the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ recording session. Timothée Chalamet is aptly cast as the man himself, both down to his similarly angular features and ability to capture his mannerisms but also because he is a public figure similarly catapulted into a bewildering level of fame (cf. the recent NYC Chalamet lookalike contest). Dylan and the band’s arrival at the culminating first electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is depicted almost as a heist, the high stakes betrayal of the folk scene so he could forge his own path and change the course of popular music, a very individualist American story. The Manchester Free Trade Hall ‘Judas’ moment is thrown in the mix to underline the ‘fuck you’ to the folk crowd that had championed him in the first place. As someone who has very self-consciously sought to situate himself in a distinctively American cultural tradition, particularly a nostalgic version of the 50s of his youth, there is something fitting about Dylan’s life being being transfigured into Hollywood kitsch.

In many ways, that story of individual overcoming collective adversity is the counterpoint to the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis which, as well as a lovingly-rendered homage to the Greenwich Village folk scene, functioned as the negative of Bob Dylan’s success story, narrating the travails of a similarly talented folk musician who simply never got the lucky break and made every wrong decision. The film ends with Davis stumbling into one of Dylan’s now legendary performances at the Gaslight Cafe, casting him as one of the legions of the unrecognised artists that haunt every one that our culture vaunts as singular genius, underscoring how talent is not sufficient to be anointed by the music industry.

Before seeing the film, I had seen criticism from some quarters that A Complete Unknown did not do justice to the ideological fissures that mark Dylan’s relationship with the folk and civil rights movements but to me that misses the point of both Dylan’s political commitment (he’s just a ‘song and dance man’) and the role of the biopic (to valorise the individual). Could Dylan have been a figurehead for the counterculture and actually led material change? It strikes me as a fatuous counterfactual. This is not to say that the political dimension of the folk movement and the socialist commitments of Dylan’s mentor, Pete Seeger, should have been played down but the miserable truth is that the fact that this moment has been turned into a big budget commodified spectacle in 2024 is symptomatic of the failures of the sixties’ counterculture.

It is hard not to see a myth-making design to all this. In November, Bob Dylan brought his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour to a conclusion with three dates at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the same place his first electric tour ended in 1966. The concerts of this tour found Dylan in a more charismatic mode, no longer just perched to the side of the stage plonking at his organ, merely offering recitals of the liturgy, they felt instead like a valedictory performance. A month later, A Complete Unknown premieres, canonising his most seminal era and recording it as cinematic scripture but the man himself is nowhere to be seen.