My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.
—Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages,” 1964
Precisely two decades ago, the iconic, well-traveled and weather-beaten singer-songwriter Bob Dylan appeared on the CBS Sunday evening television show 60 Minutes to promote the release of his hypnotic, quasi-fictional “memoirs,” Chronicles: Volume I, that had raced up the best-seller charts in the autumn of 2004.
Interviewing Dylan was the venerable Ed Bradley—strong-voiced, steady, straightforward—who had been a stalwart on the mainstream news program since the early 1980s.
They seemed like an odd couple. Bradley, donning a suit and well-trimmed beard, was direct and sincere in his approach to Dylan (he said he had wanted to interview the singer-songwriter since he first joined 60 Minutes in 1981), while his counterpart Dylan—pale, his curly, graying hair disheveled, and donning what appeared to be the hint of a pencil mustache—came off as elusive, even mysterious, his celebrated blue eyes darting into the distance, apparently operating in a different realm entirely.
Early on, Dylan provided awkward and disengaged one-word answers: When Bradley asked Dylan if he had written, as legend has it, his early-’60s anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” in just ten minutes, his answer was a hesitant “Probably.”
“Just like that?” Bradley followed.
Dylan nodded his head and eventually muttered, “Yeah.”
Bradley pressed on. “Where did it come from?” he queried.
Dylan muttered: “It just came, uh, it came from, like um, right out of that wellspring, uh, of creativity, uh, I would think, you know.”
As the interview progressed, Dylan opened up, little by little, like a tightly wound jelly jar. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written…” He then quoted from his 1964 classic, “It’s Alright, Ma.”
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying…
“Try to sit down and write something like that,” Dylan offered. “There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It‘s a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time.”
Bradley asked him if he thought he could do it again today.
“No,” Dylan acknowledged, like an aging baseball pitcher who had lost a mile or two on his fastball. “You can’t do something forever. I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”
The that referenced ruefully by Dylan—the truly phenomenal creative outpouring in which he wrote and performed dozens of profoundly brilliant songs—was his journey that began in the early 1960s, when he had just turned 20. It ended mid-decade, when fatherhood and a nearly fatal motorcycle accident sent him into a rural hiatus in upstate New York. That is the subject of and creative force, I would argue, of James Mangold’s superb, compelling and nearly perfectly crafted new film, A Complete Unknown, opening Christmas Day in Silicon Valley theaters.
Let me note here at the outset that, as a Dylan aficionado of roughly 60 years, I had great trepidations when I first heard that Mangold (Girl Interrupted, Kate & Leopold, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) was intending to make this movie. No one can pull that off, I felt, finding and directing someone to capture and recreate Bob Dylan and that at once grungy yet seemingly golden era in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early ’60s. No one.
I was wrong. Quite wrong. In a masterful turn of inspired casting, Mangold chose the talented young actor Timothée Chalamet in the lead role (he of Call Me by Your Name, Wonka, Lady Bird, Beautiful Boy and Dune fame, among others). Chalamet captures and embodies the young Dylan in a profound way that, for me at least, was unimaginable. He is remarkably convincing.
In this respect, there was something thoroughly fortuitous (and unforeseen) in leading up to production, which was originally slated to initiate roughly five years ago. Due to the Covid pandemic and some labor strife in Hollywood, rather than having only four months to prepare for the role of the iconic young Dylan, the 28-year-old Chalamet had five years. He made the most of it.
Chalamet immersed himself in Dylan’s music. He learned to play the guitar and the harmonica, practiced his Chaplin-esque mannerisms, and captured the essence of his voice and delivery—so much so that the real Dylan, now a salty 83, registered his approval in a posting on X (my god, Bob Dylan now tweets!): “There’s a movie about me opening soon called ‘A Complete Unknown’ (what a title!). Timothée Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”
The film is loosely (as in very loosely) based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, which chronicles Dylan’s ambitious journey to New York City in 1961, his maturation in the growing folk music scene (around the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger), and his controversial transformation from acoustic folkie to an electric rock ’n’ roller, highlighted by his iconoclastic electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. It’s a well-told tale and highly familiar to Dylan acolytes worldwide.
The screenplay for the film was adapted by Mangold and his longtime associate Jay Cocks, who I read somewhere actually interviewed Dylan in 1964 while Cocks was a student at Kenyon College in 1964. Mangold and Cocks have clearly used Wald’s book for the narrative structure of the film and played around with the dramatic tensions in the form of Dylan’s complex and often contentious relationships with Seeger, as well as his longtime girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, whose name was changed (rather inexplicably at Dylan’s direction) to “Sylvie Russo” in the film. I suspect that Dylan’s Chronicles and Rotolo’s own introspective memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, added considerable depth and breadth to these portrayals.
That’s the basic narrative of the film, with dramatic tensions emanating from Dylan’s complex relationships with fellow folk singers Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and girlfriend Russo (Elle Fanning). The actors all deliver exceptional performances in their respective roles and all deserve Academy Award nominations.
License to Cinema
Just so true and pure Dylan fanaticos (of which there are legions) know that I was paying attention when I attended a press screening of the film in San Francisco two weeks ago, I couldn’t help but notice the considerable cinematic license that Wald took with the real-life material on which his film was based (spoiler alert). Seeger is given a much larger presence in Dylan’s life in the film than is actually warranted (he was not at Woody Guthrie’s hospital bed when Dylan first arrived, and Dylan never crashed his TV show, much less appeared on it).
The same can be said about Johnny Cash (who wasn’t even at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in which he is portrayed to have played a supportive role to Dylan’s musical development). And Baez is depicted as playing a guitar in her duets with Dylan, which she never did; Dylan alone played it (but Mangold apparently liked the visual balance the two of them holding acoustic guitars together created).
And, since I am a bit of a geographical geek, the four-corner intersection of Bleeker and McDougal streets in the film is much broader than the narrow cul-de-sac in which the two streets come together in the West Village (which I walked through on my first trip there in 1971 and to which I have always visited whenever I return). I could go on and on.
In fact, it’s been widely reported that Dylan went so far as to insist that a completely made-up scene be included in the film. I have no idea which one it was, though it well could have been a supposedly improvised scene with a Delta blues singer named “Jesse Moffet”; as far as I can tell, there was no musician who went by that name, and Dylan never appeared on that show.
Apparently Dylan imposed the same instructions to Martin Scorsese in Rolling Thunder Revue, which was supposedly a documentary about Dylan’s 1975-76 tour of the same name. The whole bit about actress Sharon Stone, crashing the Dylan entourage as a rebellious teen, was completely made up, reportedly to Dylan’s delight.
None of those details matter, of course, because Dylan’s explosive artistic impulses are what matter and are at the true heart of the film. But I do have a couple of issues in respect to context and which do in fact inform Dylan’s journey.
The first is that there is really no mention, or significant reference, to the so-called British Invasion, headlined by the Beatles, of course, but also the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Dave Clark Fine, ad infinitum. That invasion had a powerful impact on Dylan’s drive to go electric and break free of the rules and limitations of the folk traditions.
The second, and equally significant, matter, is that Dylan, in his late teens, did not initially view himself as a folksinger. Not even close. He was inspired by the likes of Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and a host of others. His first band, the Shadow Blasters, formed in Hibbing in 1957, pounded out rock ’n’ roll for concerts at Dylan’s high school. His musical birth was conceived in the hard-driving rhythms and pulse of rock ’n’ roll, hence the title of his electric breakthrough album, Bringing It All Back Home, which included rockers “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm.”
Then, of course, there is the widely reported matter of Dylan’s extensive drug use at this time, which almost certainly fueled his creative flights. Not a single reference to that in A Complete Unknown, either.
ROCK ROOTS
My own personal (and, admittedly, lifelong) encounter with Dylan actually began where A Complete Unknown ends, early in 1966. I was 10 or 11, riding in my mother’s Ford down Highway One near the once-rural community of Soquel in Santa Cruz County, when “Just Like a Woman,” from Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album, played over the radio. It’s a moment that still resonates strongly to this day.
His was a voice with emotional tonalities I’d never encountered before, and, let’s face it, have encountered few times since. He was one of a kind, and like so many others of his fans across the nation and across the world, I knew it the instant I heard it. It changed my life. His voice and his passion and his complex, poetic lyrics profoundly touched something deep inside my youthful soul. It was a moment of self-discovery that would repeat itself over and over again.
Dylan, nearly a full generation older than I, provided the soundtrack to my life and for many members of my post-war generation and beyond. Dylan’s evocative phrasing, with all of his trademark nasal intonations and dramatic emphasis on variant syllables, touched deep into the soul of the songs’ various characters and their setting, defining not only who we are as a people but where we’ve been.
A few years later, I discovered Logos, a used records and bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz. I bought my first books and most of my first records there (all of which I still have, much to my kids’ chagrin), and where I discovered strange and rare Dylan bootleg records that were titled “GWW” (meaning Great White Wonder) and printed in honey-gold see-through vinyl. It was like a magic world had opened up.
One of the bootlegs contained a recording of Dylan with “the king of all Dylan nuts,” as Rolling Stone’s A.J. Weberman, who used to go through Dylan’s garbage in New York while creating a rather preposterous analysis of Dylan’s songs, would describe them.
There was also an early interview with Cynthia Gooding, a widely respected Village folk singer and musicologist who had begun hosting a radio program on WBAI in New York. In February of 1962, she hosted Dylan for an interview in anticipation of the release of his eponymous first album, Bob Dylan, issued by Columbia Records. It also included some songs that I had never heard before, part of Dylan’s folk repertoire before he had landed in his first recording studio.
Gooding, then more than twice Dylan’s age, conducted an intimate (even flirtatious) conversation with Dylan, which was woven between his performance. But what really caught my attention was his claim he’d just come there from South Dakota.
He claimed to have worked “with the carnival, off and on, six years,” doing “just about everything. I was the clean-up boy. I used to be on the main line on the Ferris wheel. Used to run rides … I didn’t go to school a bunch of years. I skipped this and skipped that…” He talked about a “lady I knew in the carnival. It was … they had a freak show in it, all the midgets and all that kind of stuff. … Her skin had been all burned and she was a little baby, didn’t grow right, so she was like a freak.
“All these people would pay money to see. That really sort of got me. It’s a funny thing about them. I know how these people think. They want to sell you stuff, those spectators. Like they sell little cards of themselves for ten cents. They got a picture on it, and it’s got some story. Here they are on stage. They want to make you have two thoughts. They want to make you think that they don’t feel bad about themselves and also, they want to make you feel sorry for them. I always liked that, and I wrote a song for her. It was called, ‘Won’t You Buy a Postcard.’ Can’t remember that one, though.”
All of this struck me as odd. I knew enough of the Dylan canon to know that he had grown up in Duluth and Hibbing, on the Iron Range, that he had attended the University of Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, and that he had dropped out in 1961. The carnival tale, stories of being a cowboy out west in Wyoming and New Mexico, had all been made up as part of the back story to his creative genius.
I spent too much of the evening listening to the song over and over again, well into the late-night darkness, just as I had to dozens of other Dylan songs from my adolescence into middle age. I simply could not let it go. The song, the voice, the lyrics, they were all inside me, providing, in a strange way, a cosmic shelter from the storm, while at the same instant challenging me and feeding an interior anxiety about the world and our fates and our times. At the watershed year of 50, I was still coming of age. It was an epiphany.
That is, of course, Dylan’s great interpretive gift and his genius: His ability to condense and crystalize so much emotion, so much sagacity, into a single song or performance; it has been what has made him the most fascinating and compelling musician (and, I would argue, artist) of the past half-century.
Over the closing credits of A Complete Unknown, Chalamet’s recordings of Dylan’s songs are used until the end, when Dylan’s version of “Tambourine Man” is played until the screen turns black. One can’t help but to be struck immediately by the subtle contrast between the two. Dylan’s voice and guitar performance had complexities and a richness and a depth that Chalamet’s did not. They haunted me as I walked out the theater into the cold chilled streets of San Francisco.
There are only a handful of ’60s heroes who have survived as Dylan has; ever changing. More than a half-century after the era depicted in A Complete Unknown, Dylan is still busy being born, his creative juices still flowing and flowering, perhaps not as they did during that magical moment, but flowing and flowering nonetheless. As a very wise man once told me, there’s nothing like the real thing.
Now playing at Pruneyard in Campbell (with dine-in menu) and at AMC theaters in San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale; CineLux in Campbell and Los Gatos; CineMark in Milpitas, Mountain View and San Jose; and the Aquarius in Palo Alto.
