I could have enjoyed this movie with my eyes shut as Dylan’s early songs are so evocative for me and for many others of my generation. They enlightened, moved and radicalised us. Even now we can remember where we were or what we were doing when we heard the Times they are a Changing:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
(listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90WD_ats6eE )
It is amazing how the actors and actresses recreate the sounds of Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger so accurately. No playback, they do their own singing.
You forget what a wordsmith he was and is. He is the only singer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Faced with creeping fascism globally and Trump’s triumph this call to resist still resonates today. Indeed there were many younger people in the cinema when we saw it that were not even born at the time the songs were created.
Cultural radicalisation
Set in the influential New York City music scene of the early 1960s, A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician Bob Dylan’s meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts as his songs and his mystique become a worldwide sensation that culminates in his ground breaking electric rock-and-roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Often in the years before any big political radicalisation, you can have a cultural radicalisation. People sometimes forget that before the post=1968 rise of a new anti-Stalinist and anti-imperialist Left you already had the movement for Black civil rights in the USA, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Britain and solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Dylan sung about civil rights and against war.
Dylan’s music also surfed the emergence of a new youth culture based on the expansion of higher education and the post war boom. This permitted young people to consume music, fashion and leisure commodities in a way unimagined by previous generations. This delayed entry to the workforce for a layer (mostly not working class) of this generation helped create a feeling that you could have different values than your parents or the majority culture.
Folk music at that time, both here and in the USA, was strongly influenced by radical, even socialist activists. It was seen as an authentic music form born out of a popular culture and less contaminated by capitalist consumer society. The film gets this over really well. Pete Seeger – who was ideologically close to the US Communist Party – was charged under the MacCarthyite witch hunt against the left. The scene in the courtroom, where, to the consternation of the judge, he offers to play a song, is recreated superbly. Woody Guthrie travelled around the country with a guitar that was labelled : this machine kills fascists.
New York, New York
The film captures the importance of certain places at specific times as incubators for developing culture that has a global impact. New York was already the centre of modern art but it also had a lot of folk singers, Allen Ginsberg and beat poets performing in small cafes and bars. Dylan had discovered the music of the socialist and anti-fascist, Woody Guthrie and he consciously went to New York to join this scene and visit Guthrie in hospital. Another key influence was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in which recounts his travels across the States. These cultural currents were christened the Beat generation.
A visit to see the ailing Guthrie who can hardly speak bookmarks the beginning and end of the story. Country music is another source for Dylan and we see how well he gets on with Johnny Cash. The black music of the Blues is also included as an influence. Of course Dylan’s flair was his ability to learn from all these sources and create something unique and original. There are lots of scenes where you see Dylan working at all hours on his words and music. Genius takes a lot of hard work.
A Genius but not always nice
As a biopic aiming for a mainstream market it inevitably focuses maybe overmuch on his personal relationships, with Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo. It could have shown his early commitment to the civil rights movement in more detail. He had taken risks going South to perform before he sung at the famous Martin Luther King I have a Dream rally.
The film gets it right when the women both recognise the ‘unwashed vagabond’ was also a bit of an asshole. Joan Baez’s words in the Martin Scorsese documentary (No Direction Home – on BBC IPlayer – unmissable) bear out the way he is portrayed in the film. Really talented people can be obsessive or immature in pursuit of their success – look at Mozart or any number of sports stars. Dylan’s attitude reflects the fact that the second wave of feminism was in its very early stages at that time in the States.
Everyone who has seen it has liked Ed Norton’s standout portrayal of Pete Seeger. He captures the earnestness and decency of Seeger as well as his paternalistic ‘ownership’ of the folk scene. The word is that he is a shoo-in for the Oscar’s best supporting actor.
The story is a fairly conventional biopic with the irresistible rise of Dylan to stardom. A kink in the conventional genre is the way Dylan turns to electric instruments and a louder less articulate sound at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Seeger and the traditional folkies saw this as a betrayal of their culture. They wrongly identified a particular musical form with a political content. Looking back at it today it seems a bit ridiculous and a storm in a teacup since nearly everyone moved on quite quickly.
This exchange in the movie captures the argument:
Bob Dylan: I don’t think they want to hear what I want to play.
Johnny Cash: Who’s they?
Bob Dylan: You know, the people who decide what folk music is or isn’t.
Johnny Cash: Fuck them, I wanna hear you. Go track some mud on somebody’s carpet. Make some noise,
Baez and Dylan took different highways
Dylan himself later evolved in all sorts of directions from Judaism to Christianity and was certainly no longer close to social and political movements in the same way he was with Civil Rights. But he still sung against racism and in defence of peoples’ rights – for example he helped the campaign in defence of framed boxer, Hurricane Carter. Listen to a song that in 8 minutes works better than ten leaflets or a whole pamphlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpZvg_FjL3Q
Joan Baez on the other hand remained steadfast in support of many social movements. She worked tirelessly in the anti-Vietnam war movement; she had a partner who refused to fight and was imprisoned for three years. She was jailed herself twice for short periods. Just the other day, on her 84th birthday, she led an impromptu sing along in protest against Trump in her local coffee shop.
The Scorsese documentary does include the scene where Dylan refuses to call Baez onto the stage when she assumed he was going to. He thought he had made it and no longer needed the leg up that Baez had provided earlier.
Baez’s song, Diamonds and Rust which deals with her relationship with Dylan is well worth listening to.
Well, you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes, the girl on the half-shell
Could keep you unharmed
(..)
Now you’re telling me
You’re not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
‘Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It’s all come back too clearly
Yes, I loved you dearly
And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust
I’ve already paid
Dylan has continued to produce great songs. Take a listen to Not Dark Yet, a more recent song which puts a finger on the experience of ageing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t2su8xEDEU
If you already love Dylan or are new to his music this film is worth seeing.
A couple of comments: the film brings out the important influence of Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York, Suze Rotolo. (At Dylan’s request, her name is changed to Sylvie Russo in the film). She was brought up in a left wing family and worked for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality and introduced Dylan to the left wing milieu and culture in Greenwich village. Here is a good account of Dylan’s political evolution, initially very clearly under Suze Rotolo’s guidance:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-political-bob-dylan/
Secondly, the slogan on Guthrie’s guitar was “This Machine Kills Fascists”, not fights fascism. Wikipedia says that it dates from WWII and was stuck by engineering workers on their machine tools. In one scene In the film, Dylan is seen with that on his guitar. This may be artistic licence, as the film is not wholly accurate in every detail, as Dylan isn’t about his own past. One of the themes of the film is (the public – and sometimes private) Dylan as an invention.
thanks Phil very good points. The info about Suze Rotolo would have been a good thing to add since the film dealt with the relationships a lot but did not tell us about this. I will change the thing about he guitar. I actually looked it up too when I was writing and then left the ‘fights’.