I’ve just been to see this film about Bob Dylan’s early adult life, from his arrival in New York in early 1961 to his ground-breaking performance at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where he ‘went electric’, appearing on stage for the first time with an electric guitar and a band, horrifying many folk purists and parting company with friends many of whom had helped make him famous.
It’s a very watchable and listenable film (assuming you like his songs!). The acting is wonderful, with Timothee Chalamet giving an uncanny portrayal of Dylan, complete with nervous tics and shifty look and a voice like Bob that makes you stop and listen, whatever you think of its quality (which is very good, in my opinion). A marketing slogan for CBS records in 1965- when his songs were being covered by all and sundry- ran ‘Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan’. Well, I’d venture to say that Chalamet almost ‘out-Dylans’ Dylan in his singing.. Equally Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton sing Joan Baez and Pete Seeger beautifully.
Based on Elijah Wald’s ‘Dylan goes electric’, the film tells the story through the eyes of the two main protagonists- Dylan and Seeger. In pursuit of this, it makes up a lot of stuff! Dylan did indeed come to New York to see his hero Woody Guthrie who was in hospital with Huntington’s Chorea and play the man’s songs to him. He certainly didn’t meet Pete- who shared Woody’s communist beliefs and performed with him in the 40s before he became sick- at the bedside. Nor did he sing a polished rendition of ‘Song to Woody’ and go home to Seeger and his family for the night, as the film claims. Yet the relationship between the two friends of Woody was utterly crucial to the whole Newport story, because Seeger was one of the founders of the Folk Festival and Dylan effectively destroyed it. There are some very touching scenes in which Seeger comes across as a man of deep integrity, (with more flexibility than he is usually credited, though possibly naïve and a little dull), and Dylan as either a ‘flawed genius’ or a ‘total asshole’ (In the words of Barbaro’s Joan Baez). Or a bit of both!
Which brings me to her, the third main character. Barbaro’s Baez is a strong and feisty character, championing Dylan initially and introducing him to her fans. She is charmed by Bob, seduces him and is rewarded with a first rendition of ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ by a half-naked Dylan following a night of passion, despite Baez’s assertion that their relationship was very close but not sexual. Thereon in, according to the film, she sees through him, kicking him out of her room at the Chelsea Hotel and falling out on stage in a joint tour in early 1965. This certainly didn’t happen, for if so, why would she had meekly followed him to England a month or later (as documented in the film, ‘Don’t look back’) where she was humiliated and not asked on stage?
Baez has indeed been a strong woman over the course of her life, but not in regard to Dylan, who defeated her emotionally while enriching her professionally (one of her best-selling albums is exclusively covers of his songs). She may well look at that amazing ‘It aint me babe’ duet on stage at Newport, where (supposedly) she gave him the finger and they both sang that they didn’t need each other and wish it had happened! In truth she remained (by her own admission) besotted with him for a long time.
In 1975, following the breakdown of her marriage, Dylan twitched upon her thread and invited her to join his Rolling Thunder Review. There’s a scene from Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film of the Revue where the two are filmed, talking confidentially.
Bob: Why didya leave me Joanie? (He sent her away)
Joan: You got married, Bobby!. (He married Sara Lowndes secretly a few months after Newport
Bob: Sure, I loved her, Joan. And I married her because I knew she’d always be there at home when I came back, whereas you wouldn’t be.
Despite his treatment of her, despite her marriage and child, her many civil-rights related achievements, she sang in 1975 (‘Diamonds and Rust’), remembering the old days in Greenwich Village, that ‘speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.’ This honest admission suggests she wasn’t that strong.
Her characterisation is in marked contrast to the depiction of Suze Rotolo (Ellie Fanning) (called Sylvie Russo in the film, at Dylan’s insistence, to protect his deceased lover’s reputation). Although only 17 when she met Dylan in 1961, she was old beyond her years, involved in left-wing politics, art and theatre, introducing him to all this, especially the civil rights movement, which informed many of his early ‘protest’ songs. Without doubt, she was one of the greatest of his muses. Her beautiful, honest and broadly affectionate memoir, ‘A freewheelin’ time’ depicts a relationship between two young people who loved each other dearly, while at the same time pulling no punches about Bob’s inscrutability, lying and cruelty. At the end, following an abortion which he pressurized her into and a cruel valediction ( ‘It aint me babe’ and‘Ballad in Plain D’ on ‘Another side of Bob Dylan’, the latter of which Dylan later said, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to have written that’) she walked away and certainly wasn’t persuaded to go to Newport on a motorbike!
Dylan in latter years has fulsomely paid tribute to her: ‘ Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of ”1001 Arabian Nights”. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness, a Rodin sculpture come to life…(Bob Dylan, ‘Chronicles’). That tenderness, that aching longing for her when in 1962 she left to study in Italy, leading to songs such as ‘Tomorrow is a long time’ and ‘Boots of Spanish leather’, is not depicted in the film. Theirs was a relationship of mutual love which buckled under the pressure of his celebrity, not to mention Joan Baez, yet in the film she is portrayed as something of a doormat, instead of one who nurtured his talent , understanding his need to be alone and to write, but then moving on when rejected. This is a shame, and doesn’t do Dylan credit, for both she and Baez were strong, modern women.
This contrasts with the person he chose to be his wife, and mother of his children, the former model Sara Lowndes, not featured in the film, who has always held her own counsel, playing the role of stay at home wife and mother. (‘My love she speaks like silence/ without ideals or violence- ‘Love minus zero/ no limit’). Sara can truly be said to have been the great love of his life and the muse for whom he wrote more songs than any other woman. Yet he ended up treating her worse even than Suze or Joan. As he himself said, ‘I have not been a good husband.’
There is one other gap in the film’s treatment of Dylan, namely its failure to look into his inner life and source of creativity. My wife Sarah (who likes a happy ending) was quite distressed by the depiction of Dylan’s sacrilege at Newport 65 and asked me ‘why did he have to play those songs there?’ It’s a fair question and, not for the first time, made me ask why I allow this man who takes such great pleasure in annoying and upsetting people consume so much of my life. The film took some time exploring Dylan’s changing musical interests, but gave little time to his lyrical development, his growing interest in symbolist and surrealist poetry, modern art and the Beat movement, – all of which led to his performance at Newport. It was not primarily an act of cultural vandalism, but an assertion of artistic independence in a man who had changed.
So, despite these misgivings, did the film succeed in its aim? James Mangold, the Director, when pitching the film to Dylan himself who asked him its subject matter, said something like: ‘It’s about a man who came from the culturally suffocating North country to breathe the free air of Greenwich Village, discovered his voice and fame, but after a while found himself suffocating again through people’s expectations and decided to break free’. ‘A Complete Unknown fulfils this aim well. When he broke the electric silence on stage at Newport, the first song he chose was ‘Maggie’s Farm’.
‘I try my best to be just like I am
Everybody wants me to be just like them.
Dylan has always refused to be tied down by people’s expectations and to be what Robert Shelton, his biographer and writer of his first glowing review in 1961 called a ‘puppet laureate’.
Timothee Chalamet says he is now a fully paid up member of the ‘church of Bob’. My hope is that other people, like him, to whom Dylan is a ‘complete unknown’ will have found,through the film his music either for the first time, or again after many years. In doing so, they will, in Chalamet’s words, have found the ‘gift that keeps on giving.’
Hugh's Views 