“A Complete Unknown” is the rare Hollywood movie that has inspired a reckoning. Everywhere, on social media, in mainstream media, or simply on the part of so many who have seen the film, a tingling conversation is taking place — a kind of collective meditation/investigation into who Bob Dylan was, who he is, what he meant back then and what he means now. What’s striking is that very little of this is Dylan nostalgia — i.e., the boomers getting misty-eyed with self-importance about “their” beloved icon. And if that’s what it was, it would be lame. (No one would hate it more than Dylan.)
The Dylan conversation that’s been ignited is very present tense and alive, and very exploratory. It’s about the movie, but it’s bigger than the movie. It’s about everyone who has seen “A Complete Unknown,” or everyone who simply grew up with Dylan, looking anew at the question: What was it about him? What‘s his magic, his hold on us?
The reason that’s a question we’re still wrapping our heads around is that the answer is still mysterious. If you talk about the Beatles or the Stones (who, along with Dylan, make up the holy triumvirate of the ’60s Music Gods Who Changed Everything), their majesty is infinite, yet in an obvious way we can all feel what it was about. The Beatles did nothing less than recolor the world’s DNA; we hardly need to have them explained. The Stones, for decades, were referred to as “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world,” and that kind of said it.
But Bob Dylan, from the moment he came up, 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 inaccurate. He did start off as a protest singer; he did go electric, and that was a game-changing, world-shifting moment. But none of that, in an odd way, describes what’s transcendent about Dylan. And what I love about “A Complete Unknown” — and what I think the movie has, in a way, almost been undervalued in doing — is that it channels the magic of Dylan far beyond those pesky labels. It shows you that what was beautiful about him was something that can’t be put into words.
Many have noted that Dylan, as Timothée Chalamet plays him, is an intentionally mysterious and obscure figure, who speaks in tossed-off epigrams and ornery cryptic asides. He’s not about to let that thing called conversation pin him down. When Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who has become romantically involved with him, says, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” that’s the dimension of him she’s referring to — that in addition to competitively dismissing her, he’ll make up stuff about his past (like saying that he joined the circus) and refuse to cop to it, not allowing even his lover to pin down who he is. In “A Complete Unknown,” the Dylan we see is the original too-cool-for-school indie-rock jerk. You’d better believe that Lou Reed — the most infamous asshole in the history of rock ‘n’ roll — copped huge dollops of that attitude from Dylan, along with the essence of Dylan’s swaying-back-and-forth talk-singing style.
Yet if Chalamet’s Dylan were merely a hooded figure who kept his thoughts under wraps, it might seem that he was doing it all for effect. Yes, he is 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. He is also a mystery to himself — an artist who channels what’s going on around him but doesn’t really want to explain it, even to himself. That would kill the mystery. When Bob, in the movie, talks about what Woody Guthrie meant to him, 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 primal: not “protest” but something richer and deeper and more timeless. A template of faith.
And this ties into how we experience Dylan’s songs in the movie: as emanations of a spirit that render him not just a great singer-songwriter but a force, a cosmic messenger. The message of his music is faith. That’s why his impulse to go electric is an act that the folkies, led by Pete Seeger, don’t understand. It’s not just they prefer acoustic instruments. They believe in ideas: the fight for social justice. Dylan does…and does not. He believes in something more personal and un-sayable: the ability of a song to usher us into a state of reverence, to lift you into the heavens.
One reason why the Dylan reckoning taking place now is moving to me is that it mirrors my own journey with Dylan. For too many years, everything I knew about him, and learned about him, got in the way of my ability to truly hear him. Growing up in the ’70s, I had many of his records and listened dutifully to them, but I somehow always felt like I was missing something. Simply put, I couldn’t grasp most of the lyrics, and that made me feel like I was a C student in Dylanology. What did those torrents of words mean? I recognized that the “protest singer” label was one that he’d grown past in a few years. But what he’d never grown past was how the boomers lionized him as a “poet.” I’ve never much cared for poetry; it doesn’t speak to me. And I felt like most of Dylan’s poetry sailed over my head.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to truly hear Dylan, and to confront the great paradox about him: that his lyrics, much of the time, don’t matter all 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 greatest Dylan 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 the counterculture to the world beyond it, that charts the journey of his marriage to Sara Lownds, yet it’s also about none of those things. The song is about the feeling of it, of seeing the life you’ve lived come into view even as it recedes like a lost highway. And that’s right there in the sound of it.
What I got more in touch with as a I got older is that Bob Dylan’s genius is all about sound. The hushed lilt 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 seesaws it, and brays and caresses it, and deposits it right into your soul, even when you don’t know what it means. And when he went electric, he achieved a sound — singular in the history of rock — that was sweet and furious at the same time. He lifted you up not the way Woody Guthrie did but the way J.S. Bach did. Whatever the topic happened to be, Dylan was singing religious music. A hard rain was gonna fall, but the miracle was that Dylan had captured that rain and made the truth of it beautiful.
Music is sound, and what Timothée Chalamet captures, with his extraordinary lived-in 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 to touch the uncanny, to carve out, in song after song, a privileged five-minute space in the universe, and to invite us to pour our emotions into that space. “A Complete Unknown” isn’t the greatest rock biopic (that would be “Sid and Nancy”), but it brings off something singular within the world of rock biopics. It lights up the holy space that Dylan created, allowing you to see it and hear it and touch it and live inside it, until you realize it’s life that’s electric.