“It’s not as bad as it could have been,” wrote a friend of the new Bob Dylan biopic . The movie, starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro, traces Dylan’s arrival in New York City as a college dropout from Minnesota, his rise to eminence as a performer and songwriter in the context of the “folk music” boom in Greenwich Village, and his subsequent controversial performance with an electric blues band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Along the way, Dylan accepts patronage and hospitality (and breakfast) from Pete Seeger, sleeps with several beautiful women, befriends Johnny Cash and wears sunglasses indoors.
The strength of the movie is the acting. Chalamet, Norton and Barbaro offer fabulous performances—better versions, really, than the versions of Dylan, Seeger, and Baez offered up over the years by the originals. I’ve never wanted to meet any of these people in real life, but I’d love to hang out with their fictional counterparts. Plotwise, the movie lacks much of the narrative tension one expects from famous biopics about, say, Billie Holiday, Elvis, or Buddy Holly—a struggle against racism, for example, or against evil managers. We know from studio outtakes that Dylan struggled mightily to hammer songs like “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” into presentable form. Here we see none of the sweat. Dylan does pretty much what he wants. He writes some songs. People like them. They preach to him; he ignores them and adjusts his sunglasses. At the end, he rides off alone on his motorcycle. The film is loosely adapted from Elijah Wald’s book . Much of the narrative interest comes from the liberties that the film has taken with the historical record. Of course, Dylan goes to meet Woody Guthrie on his first evening in New York. Of course, by an incredible coincidence, Pete Seeger happens to be in Guthrie’s room on that fateful night. Of course, Seeger invites the scruffy and potentially dangerous stranger to crash at his house, where his wife and kids roam unprotected. None of it is true, but the wild implausibility of it all is one of the things that generates interest in a film that’s telling a tired story. We watch it as the Greeks must have listened to The Iliad. We all know how it ends. But what will Achilles do next?
And yet, the movie has attracted outsized media attention. Some of this may be from the genius of Dylan’s management, which co-produced and which unveils a new Dylan “event” (a documentary, a play, a book, a bootleg) on a more or less yearly basis, usually just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Other aspects of the media frenzy are harder to fathom: The New York Times has run an entire series of articles about Dylan, his fashion choices, , his iconic status. There’s a new Levi’s line and . NPR has recently replayed . Even The Nation, which usually knows better, ran an entire (I have great seasonal albums by Perry Como and the Kingston Trio that I could have recommended instead).
As someone who has written a bit about Dylan here and there, I can attest that not a single day has gone by in the past month without me receiving a message: What did you think? Thanks to this film I’m now in touch with a woman I went to high school with and hadn’t seen for forty years. Unknown graduate students from Italy and Israel ask me to weigh in. University administrators who would normally scorn my very existence now want to chat.
What’s going on? Who cares about a snippet of a concert that happened fifty years ago and that only a few hundred people saw? The raw history is the stuff of Trivial Pursuit. Moreover, as Dylan could clearly see, folk music was already dead as a popular musical form. It had been killed by the Beatles, a year earlier, and a group of Beatles imitators called The Byrds had just scored a top radio hit with an electrified version of part of a Dylan song called “Mr. Tambourine Man” that they heard on a demo tape. If the Byrds could hit pay dirt with just a few lines of Dylan, how could anyone expect Dylan not to follow them to the bank? No wonder he rides away on his motorcycle at the end of the film. There is money down the road.
My experience of seeing the film may offer a clue to its outsized impact in the public imagination. I saw it the day after the anniversary of the January 6 attacks on the Capitol, the day of the death of Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary. In my local theater, in California, the first few scenes brought many in the crowd to tears. The lady in front of me sobbed quietly through most of the rest of the film—and she was not the only one weeping. The people next to me held an animated whispered debate about Seeger and McCarthyism. And when it was over, people left the theater in a kind of stunned silence, as if they had just witnessed a major event of some kind.
What they had witnessed was a fable about the death of community. The movie pitches itself between the grand world of geo-politics and the intimate world of the artist’s motivations. It tells us little about Bob Dylan, but much about the group of people around him. Norton is brilliant as Pete Seeger—brave, committed, generous, good, but also overwhelmed by events, left wandering around confused as Dylan rocks out. Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie (based on Suze Rotolo) leaves him, and Baez sees right through him. We watch as these characters, well-intentioned and committed to social change, are disappointed and left empty-handed by Dylan’s overwhelming ambition. It is that ambition that eventually isolates him. And when he leaves, a moment of American cultural history is put on the shelf. Musicians, including Dylan, will continue to do good things, donating money, performing at benefits, and so on. But such gestures will always be tainted with self-promotion. A hint of cynicism will always flicker across the screen after Newport ’65.
And it is here that the film is completely contemporary. The current crisis of American democracy, Trump’s genius at turning us against each other, the arrogance of a gilded class that sails above us in their private planes—all of these big themes hover around A Complete Unknown. It’s a fable about the end of an ideal of American unity and optimism. About the failure of goodness. We might place it less in the history of biopics about genius than in a tradition of stories about communities that turn bad—GarcĂa Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, or Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.
This sense that something is now over in American life connects to the larger Dylan story. For fifty years he has been a steady voice. Even when his records have been bad, he has denounced fakery, greed, and injustice. For the past three years he has been on tour promoting his great 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, a meditation on poetry and old age. That tour often found fans listening to the aging singer in a kind of reverent silence. “It was like a religious event,” said a new convert about the LA concert, which he attended at my urging because he had never “gotten” Dylan. But now it’s over. A friend in London told me that when Dylan played his final show at Royal Albert Hall, everyone around him was weeping—not because of the music, but because, at his age, Bob would certainly never return to their shores. First Brexit, now this.
In this context the emblematic moment in the film is not Dylan on stage with his band of bluesmen, shouting into the microphone about refusing to work on Maggie’s Farm no more. It is the early scene where we see Seeger visiting the dying Woody Guthrie in his hospital. Guthrie, who had Huntington’s Disease, was the link to an earlier age of activist music, to the true voice of the American working class, to a time when it seemed things might get better. Seeger visits him and sings to him. But Guthrie cannot sing back. The connection to a collective experience of American idealism is broken. Seeger is working vainly to build a movement that could carry the torch. Dylan emerges to fill the space left by Guthrie’s silence, wounding, in the process, the little community that had nourished and supported him.
And yet. As the movie ends, we hear a glorious recording of Dylan’s masterpiece, “Like a Rolling Stone,” played over the credits. The music is so marvelous and exciting—even now—that it leaves you wondering whether the destruction of community was worth it, to create art of such power. And whether some new community can ever be born out the chaos it performs. That’s the question A Complete Unknown wants us to ask.
Timothy Hampton is the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History.