Thoughts on the Bob Dylan Film

Even after two rounds of downsizing my library of books, CD’s, and vinyl albums, I still have 33 recordings (several of them box sets) and a shelf of 30 books about Bob Dylan. Only Joni Mitchell, with 18 recordings and eight books, comes close. Even deities in my music pantheon like John Coltrane in jazz, Ruben Blades in Latin music, Joe Strummer in his Clash and post-Clash stages, and Björk in her own genres, account for far fewer. After that, even consensus deities like Bob Marley, Dolly Parton, and Johann Sebastian Bach lag far behind.

Thus it is catnip for to me think about A Complete Unknown, the recent movie about Dylan’s early career featuring Timothée Chalamet as “hot Dylan” and fine renditions of some of his greatest songs. I write to share some thoughts about it. Believe it or not, I think I can add a distinctive perspective amid the flood of commentary about Dylan, and I will concentrate my energies there.  

I will proceed by discussing how I came to have so many Dylan books, which will lead toward explaining how they help us understand what the film accomplishes. This route will take us through my distinctive interests in how musicians use religious, or at least religion-adjacent, concepts and musical traditions to articulate socio-political critiques. This has been true of Dylan both during years covered by the film and more generally—although of course this is just one of many things we should notice in the film. With this context, I will turn to the film’s overall strengths and weaknesses, with a view toward where it fits within a bigger picture.  

Although this is not a great film, without limitations worth noting, it is more than solid. Its high points are outstanding, and it is excellent for sparking thought about major issues. You should definitely watch A Complete Unknown if you haven’t thought about Dylan lately and/or you care about how music relates to cultural critique. However, I will suggest that the film should be more a starting point for reflection than an end point. 

How I Got All Those Books

I don’t actually listen to Dylan any more than the other artists I mentioned. I have all those books and CDs because I wrote this chapter about his use of overtly or implicitly religious ideas and musical traditions, which appeared in this collection. I wrote it because I projected it as a chapter in my own book on intersections between religious discourse, cultural critique, and popular music. Other chapters, some nearly finished and others stalled, now strike me like month-old meatloaf in the back of my refrigerator, so I'm not sure if the book will appear. But I did polish the Dylan part (although I hoped to revise it with more forgiving word limits) plus other sections including this essay I projected as the introduction. 

Sadly, owning only 30 books and dozens of recordings marks me as a slacker in the world of Dylan critics. Hardcore Bob bros spend orders of magnitude more of their brain cells learning massive amounts of trivia, attending dozens of live shows, and often leveraging direct personal knowledge. So let’s pause for a rant about how, in academia, people may spend whole careers diving outrageously deep into weeds, parsing what past experts said about arcane topics. Meanwhile, others write with unwarranted confidence about overgeneralized topics. If one asks where my authority as Dylan scholar falls along this continuum, I have ample basis to weigh in compared to people at the overreaching-with-unwarranted-confidence pole. But sadly that’s a low bar to pass, while a deluge of work along the continuum means that I can't make much dent in the discourse. 

Why You Should Read My Chapter on Dylan and Religion

Still I do hope you will read my chapter—less because it overlaps with the film discussion than because it is a fascinating case study of a wider phenomenon: musicians who help build our common sense about spiritual/religious values with political implications. Dylan is a classic case, as are Johnny Cash (showcased in the film) and Mavis Staples (who could have been in it). A recent case was a clash of values between Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl show and Donald Trump’s celebration of cruelty and racist austerity politics. Lamar’s fans know how deep his spiritual roots go, informing his anti-racism. Meanwhile, the debate over what Christianity should stand for—does it champion justice and the common good or fuse with Trump’s mashup of corruption and authoritarianism—matters a great deal for whether we can put any brakes on Trump’s gangsterism. Dylan’s work is a classic locus for bringing such questions into focus—and by extension a place to make corrections if we bring assumptions to the debate that get our answers out of focus. 

I won’t repeat my chapter’s arguments here, since they were hard enough to summarize in a chapter-length version that could presuppose a lot. You can click to read it. Suffice it to say I underline continuities of religious resonance across Dylan’s career and explore patterns in how fans interpret them. Due to two factors—how we conceive stages in his career and how religious allusions often fly over listeners' heads—understandings of this are frequently distorted or flat-out wrong. Dylan’s religion-adjacent themes are salient both before and after his supposedly short Christian stage in the 1980s, and both during accepted high points—disproportionately hyped—and assumed low points. The latter were admittedly uneven, but unevenness has been a constant in all stages of his career, and even during years when forgettable songs were thicker on the ground, there were superb highs. These may go unnoticed due to the unevenness, his press team’s talking points flooding the zone, or other aspects of what Joni called “the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.” 

One example discussed in my essay is “Dark Eyes” from his widely hated Empire Burlesque album (1985). It can come to life as a top twenty-five Dylan song (intertextual with masterpieces like “Blind Willie McTell”) provided we grasp how its logic is rooted in a passage from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, right before Jesus says “you can’t serve God and mammon.” Its phrase “A drunken man is at the wheel/hunger pays a heavy price/to the falling gods of speed and steel” is one of the best soundtracks for Trump’s rule that I can imagine.

Approaching from this direction, my essay explored Dylan’s religious voice—equidistant from black church, Jewish, and white Christian imaginations, and hardwired with apocalyptic sensibilities—and how audiences hear it. Although this is not a one-size-fits-all key to interpret him, it is a key component from beginning to end.

By no means have I agreed with everything Dylan has said using this voice, especially about Zionism and gender. Sometimes he dances right on a line where apocalyptic pessimism can cross over from incisive critique into fatalistic complacency. Still, this voice has been consistently fascinating and most often simpatico about race, class, and militarism. If you care about the weight that left-liberal Jewish and/or Christian values of social justice carry in our culture—whether packaged overtly as organized religion or diffused in what scholars call secular Protestantism and traces of Jewish prophetic traditions—then the long-running weight of Dylan’s music is a classic place to explore it, starting right from his first album's version of the civil rights anthem “Gospel Plow.”   

A Complete Unknown doesn’t focus heavily on religion-adjacent issues, and by extension they are not my major focus in what follows, but there are plenty of overlaps if we pay attention. Meanwhile the issues extend beyond Dylan’s early years, and this creates additional overlaps since the film frames his full legacy in dialogue with other films and all those books I mentioned at the outset. Let’s think together, both about the film and the legacy, as these issues overlap and come apart. 

Stages of Bobness: the Standard Approach and Its Movie Versions

If you aren’t a Bob bro, you may not have registered how much of what I’ve just written cuts against the grain of accepted wisdom—or if you are a bro, you may have tuned me out by now. All good bros know his career had many stages, usually broken down as follows. First folkie (overtly political). Then electric/rock/psychedelic (somewhat apolitical with cultural implications to debate). Then complex gradations of country/folk/rock (with and without fluctuating politics). Then evangelical apocalyptic (Boo! We know it’s right wing! But in what sense? Never mind, we don’t listen.) Then wandering in the wilderness. Then reconnecting to older and wiser sources in folk and blues traditions, grumpy about the challenge of sustaining commendable values under racial capitalism. After that various experiments including Frank Sinatra covers. When I earlier spoke of continuities across Dylan’s career, this was the opposite of lumping religion in a short fundamentalist stage. It asserted a through line across the stages.    

Critics treat three moments as peaks deserving priority attention. First, the rebellious and less politicized rock stage where A Complete Unknown is turning at the end. Second, parts of his 1970s folk/rock period, especially the Rolling Thunder Tour and Blood on the Tracks (1975). Third, the grizzled wiser Bob returning (supposedly purged of Christianity although this is mainly wrong; the point to accent is moving away from more strident Pentecostalism) starting with Time Out of Mind (1997). After these come a cast of honorable mentions, including Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964.) To some extent everyone presupposes that these early highs hold steady in the background, establishing a baseline for his cultural reach and the fascination of later changes. Let’s say they are tied for fourth, slightly in the shadow of later peaks. 

A Complete Unknown foregrounds and largely champions this fourth foundational stage, despite its narrative arc that heralds the dawn of the electric stage. 

Turning to Hollywood treatments of Dylan, A Complete Unknown makes its mark against a canonical version of the “discontinuous-Bob-with-somewhat-embarrassing-early-highs” narrative. This is the critic-approved I’m Not There (2007) which dramatizes his changes by casting five separate actors to play him in distinct parts of the film. Two of three parts that parallel A Complete Unknown feature a young black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) in a Woody Guthrie cap playing a stilted folk Dylan, contrasted with Cate Blanchett playing a nihilistic-seeming and drug-addled electric Dylan. Their contrast is turned up to 11, with Blanchett/Dylan turning his/her back on everything before. This captures part of the truth and fits a standard narrative that he was a tortured loner who should never be pinned down and always must transgress boundaries, with the folk scene as a paradigm of narrowness.

In the jargon of music scholars, celebrating this rebel stance dovetails with “rockism”—an interpretive sensibility that is gendered notably male and sometimes toxic male. (Casting Blanchett functioned—however consciously—to deflect attention from such possible political incorrectness and nudge Dylan toward the orbit of more promising exemplars of gender-bending like David Bowie and Prince.) I’m Not Here has a brief section on Dylan’s Christian rock stage, featuring a solid version of “Pressing On,” but on balance we could read it like an interlude to visit a zoo and look at a noble but strange animal. Approaching in a similar light, rockists could interpret this stage as a reprise of early narrowness—the film does not discourage this when it casts Christian Bale for both its 1963 and early 1980’s Dylan—followed by the grizzled reprise of rockist authenticity (or, more precisely, trickster semi-authenticity) with emphasis on blues roots as a through line. 

I’m Not There provides extensive catnip for Bob bros and film scholars, but if we approach it as the canonical Hollywood Dylan, this will bias our interpretation against his early folk strengths. In this context, I digress to nominate my far less cool preference: Dylan’s own exceedingly underrated Masked and Anonymous (2003). It is odd and rough around its edges—not a place for Bob newbies to start—but its trickersterism flew miles over the heads of its many haters, not least because they didn’t seem to grasp how Dylan deployed his religious voice against a dystopian future that is easily mapped onto Trumpism. Let's save this for another article on some other day, when we should also talk about the Coen brothers’ under-appreciated Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and various Dylan documentaries.  

A Complete Unknown and Its Roads Not Taken

I champion A Complete Unknown, above all, because it does a commendable job of showcasing the songs that got the “why-should-we-care-about-Dylan-in-the-first-place” train rolling. The key singers do impressive, often compelling, work—not just Chalamet as Dylan but also Monica Barbaro as John Baez and Ed Norton as Pete Seeger. Its reconstruction of the Greenwich Village folk scene is well done. The power of Dylan’s early politicized anthems, especially “Masters of War” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” are screened in exemplary ways, as are breakthrough electrified songs like “Maggie’s Farm.” This is the main part of the battle, decisively won.  

Would I have liked more and better? Yes indeed, I would have. Let’s walk together down the path of the Dylan geeks, considering a few pro and con trade-offs that flow from how the film streamlines the story. 

We can distinguish three levels: a big picture, nit-picky details, and middle-range questions about what was lost and gained through choices that structure the film—its roads taken and not taken. I've recommended the big picture, and the flip side of that is how the film had to simplify. Let’s not quibble about micro-choices—things like whether it was forgivable to leave out Phil Ochs (except for a wink when Baez covers one of his songs), take liberties with Johnny Cash, give misleading impressions about how long Sylvie (really Suze Rotolo) went to Italy and how that affected the timing of their breakup, and so on ad infinitum. You can entertain the Bob bros in your life by encouraging them to tell you everything about all of this. Or you can go down this rabbit hole by yourself, pursuing things like why Chamalet made sixty-seven costume changes. But let’s just not.  

A Middle Range of Choices

Regarding the middle range, though—structural places where the film could have scaled back or leaned in—let’s scratch the itch. It’s not that how it focused was necessarily bad; it's just that we can imagine it unfolding differently in ways that matter. 

The film leaned into (1) Dylan’s individual career self-assertion (with folk holding him back) in tension with selected politicized aspects of his work, (2) the Cold War as social context, especially dramatized through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and (3) a melodramatic romantic triangle among Dylan, Rotolo, and Baez. 

(Fun fact: in real life this was at least a romantic hexagon that also involved Dylan’s soon-to-be-spouse Sara Lownds—the “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”—the muse Edie Sedgwick whom Dylan shared with Andy Warhol—from “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat”—Mavis Staples, plus flirtations with Joan Baez’s sister Mimi. We can sympathize with the screenwriters’ challenge. If you want details, see David Hadju’s Positively Fourth Street or one of the biographies like this one.)

Each focus has advantages and trade-offs. Regarding political and aesthetic aspects of Dylan’s changes, we have a strong start. No doubt the folk scene had narrowness—although pop and rock also did and one could debate which was the lesser evil. The film captures Dylan’s frustrations with folk, and by extension why it mattered when he modeled, for the many who followed his lead, how to move beyond it into later stages of folk/rock. The film calls attention to downsides of his turn from the more optimistic and activism-forward praxis of Baez and Seeger (plus Rotolo, Ochs, Staples, etc.)—downsides hardwired into one package with his innovations. We could lean further into this given that plenty of other stars, including Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer, followed in his aesthetic footsteps without trimming their politics as much.  

This is tricky, since the film could also have leaned harder into collective countercultural resonances (as opposed to dramas of individual genius) of his turn to blues/rock. To grasp such resonances we must dig into songs like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone”—as well as “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” which I left out of my earlier sentence about exemplary showcasing of his folk because the film’s version is depoliticized and defanged.

In general, we could frame Dylan’s change less as repudiating straw forms of folk and more as bringing emergent folk sensibilities—including much of its politics—into a rock scene that was also a moving target. (For example, it is just barely possible to read the film's "Hard Rain" sequence extending Dylan's early politics into later years, although the film mainly fumbles that ball.) We could note how his changes were welcomed, not resisted, by most fans in 1965, even if not by the film’s stuck-in-the-mud purists. On this point I agree with Mike Marqusee’s The Wicked Messenger, as well as Jeff Taylor and Chad Israelson’s The Political World of Bob Dylan which adds major insights about the religious parts.  

But back to the big picture! A Complete Unknown is mainly good for introducing all of this, just slightly undernourished.  

The Cuban Missile Crisis as All-Purpose Political Context

Regarding the film’s stress on the Cold War—and by extension its Seeger-centrism that hints at wider clashes between anti-communists and an Old Left Popular Front—here again the foundation is solid. For many viewers, the film likely evoked part of what I'm about to say is missing. 

Still...is there enough about Vietnam? Civil rights? Second-wave feminism?   

When the film digs into the Cuban missile crisis, deploying “Masters of War” and “Blowin' in the Wind,” this works. But it also decenters Vietnam protest—not yet blossoming as the film starts but well underway as it ends—as a context for the resonance of folk musicians. Was this dog barking enough? I ask partly because the most emphasized effect of “Masters of War” in the film concerns not a soundtrack for Vietnam protest, nor much anti-militarist praxis at all, but rather luring Baez—traumatized by the crisis—into Dylan’s bed. The scene that follows, centering on “Blowin’ in the Wind,” features Joan's body nearly as much as the music. This complaint may be too harsh since the two did bond over the politics of their music. Still, we can ponder trade-offs and imagine a more pointedly politicized film. To me, the soundtrack’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” comes across stronger when reprised without visuals during the closing credits—it made me think about music videos that are flashy, yet one gradually notices that the visuals are subtracting from music would be better off without them.  

Turning to civil rights, the film briefly shows Dylan and Baez singing at the 1963 March on Washington. It shows— quickly and abstractly—Sylvie/Suze telling Bob about her work with the Congress for Racial Equality, which was organizing Freedom Rides at the time. Left on the cutting room floor were many more ways that civil rights was central to the folk scene, not least through spiritually-infused social justice themes. For this film, black music (as valorized) is mainly Delta blues or (as mocked) manifests as a stylized set-piece of prison laborers singing to upscale listeners at the Newport Folk Festival.    

There is a dog barking here, but faintly—the centrality of black gospel and critiques of racism in Dylan’s work. Classic examples include how “Blowin’ in the Wind” reworks the spiritual “Many Thousands Gone” and how Dylan drew on this tradition in “Blind Willie McTell.” Although it may be picky to fret about the framing of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” surely we should note how “Only a Pawn in Their Game” receives only three seconds—nine total words at the March on Washington—and kindred songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” are absent. It makes the narrative about Dylan’s folk whiter than it could be. Despite “Masters of War” working and the film valorizing Delta blues as a foundation for Dylan’s rock, these don't fully substitute. 

Romantic Triangles With and Without Feminism 

Regarding gender, let’s take the easy question first. Was there too much melodrama? Far too much! Can we bracket that and move to something less annoying? But also...does the Cold War take too much focus off gender politics? That's trickier. To some degree, the years in focus imply keeping second-wave feminism slightly off-center, implicit and foreshadowed more than full-throated. Meanwhile, Dylan’s toxic masculinity, especially how he wronged Rotolo and Baez, comes through clearly. I’m prepared to give the film minimal feminist props for flagging this, although it pulls punches and could have said more about Rotolo's influence on Dylan. (As discussed here, this included introducing him to Bertold Brecht’s generative Three Penny Opera.) Each time I’ve rewatched the film, I’ve become twitchier with my fast forward button during scenes of Sylvie making mopey faces. Also, Baez was the more powerful half of the Bob/Joan power couple in these years. I can’t decide if I think this comes through enough, but I’m sure that if it doesn’t, that's not a small matter.  

So, if the film made you fume that Bob was an asshole to Suze and Joan—yeah he was, both in personal politics and politics politics. You should listen to their side of the story, here and here, and extend your questions to later years. 

Also, it could have been cool to see Bob flirting with Mavis. Since that didn’t go far in real life, it belongs in our small picture category. And yet... the film could have killed two birds with the same stones—better championing women and getting civil rights in focus—through showing Bob bond with Mavis over gospel, or highlighting Suze’s influence, or perhaps even bringing in Odetta’s cover of “Masters of War.” (For years this was my standard version, serving even more than Baez as my gateway drug to Dylan. The film only lets Odetta stand in the wings at Newport and watch.)  

A Little More on Dylan and Religion 

We touched on Bob’s religious voice while pondering Suze and Mavis. But if we link this too narrowly to music touching on race and/or black religion, we underplay how Jewish prophetic sensibilities and white Christian ones circulating in the Seeger/Guthrie orbit also contributed.  

Is this dog also barking too quietly? Although I don’t insist on this for the film, let’s inquire about it since we’ve been thinking with my chapter. Consider two of Dylan’s major records from shortly after the film’s time-frame, “All Along the Watchtower” and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” Both are highly resonant in relation to Vietnam, and both are deeply informed by his study of the Bible. Later, apocalyptic songs from the 1980s like "Slow Train Coming" have related sensibilities, which continue long afterward. We flagged “Dark Eyes” but there are many others, by no means relevant only when he riffs on black musical traditions. (I posted about one of these last week.)

A Complete Unknown could have leaned into such resonances without much change in where it already focused. For example, out of eight verses of “Masters of War,” the film uses two and a half. These include asking the war profiteers “Is your money that good?/Could it buy you forgiveness?” and stating that “when your death takes it toll/the money you made will never buy back your soul.” Perhaps we should simply take the win, noting how this comes up, front and center, in the film’s most resonant political sequence. Yet the film cuts verses in which the masters of war are “like Judas of old” and “even Jesus would never forgive what [they] do.” We could imagine a film in which “Masters of War” resolves less into Baez kissing Dylan, and more into how Dylan (and Baez more-so) framed their critique of militarism with a prophetic voice.

A major Dylan song from this era, “With God on Our Side,” has an extremely powerful and pointed critique of Christian Nationalism. When Baez heard Dylan play it at a party, this was the song that actually jumpstarted their romance, and it became one of their signature duets. If the film had woven this together with “Masters of War” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the three would have packed a wallop. Extrapolating further, we might even dare to imagine linking the three to Guthrie’s “Jesus Christ” in which Jesus “said to the rich/give your goods to the poor/so they laid Jesus Christ in the grave.” At least to my ear, that could be a better use of Guthrie than the film offers with “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” plus Dylan's fairly anemic “Song for Woody."  

Could it have worked? Here again, just as with emphasizing the missile crisis over Vietnam while leaving out Hattie Carroll, the film's middle range choices shape its take-away impressions. If we lean into my wider argument about it, the question gains force. 

Last Thoughts

Wrapping up, I leave you with comments about three core issues: how the film handled its foci for simplifying Dylan’s early years, how it framed his wider career, and how it ends with productive questions for further thought.  

First about foci. Provided we extrapolate from the Cold War to fill in adjacent spaces related to Vietnam and civil rights, we’re largely OK. We simply should notice how these are off center, for better and worse. Likewise if we can pull off the dual trick of bracketing melodrama and extrapolating to later entanglements between Dylan and second-wave feminism, again we’re in good shape—maybe for the better since too much about it could mess up the chemistry, pushing into an extra decade with a new set of folk/rock singers, many of them women. On the spiritual front, if we extrapolate from the Judas-like masters of war and the gospel resonances of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” extending toward the apocalyptic sensibilities in “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” and from there to long-running themes from later years, yet again we’re fine as long as we're mindful about it. 

Now about stages of Bobness. If you feared this film would overdramatize his break from political folk toward electrified rock—yeah, it did. Possibly it dug that interpretive rut somewhat deeper when we need it shallower. Nevertheless, if we compare A Complete Unknown to I’m Not There and its fellow-traveling scholars, the new film is better. It couldn't ignore the rut, but partly countervailed against it by spending so much time on the foundational music that Dylan was partly leaving behind, mainly extending in new ways. This was my first impression and I return to underline it at the end. 

This does lead into tangled debates among the Dylanology bros. If you felt disquiet about the rails the film made you ride—the melodrama and the heavy-handed morality play at Newport—go with your gut. There is more to ponder where that came from. By no means is this a small picture matter, even if some of the scholarship is pedantic and it's cliché to rehash whether the Newport folk purists really tried to chop the power chord with an ax or were only worried about the sound mix. If we wish to understand what emerging musical subcultures created during this period—with Dylan and Cash in a vanguard and “Like a Rolling Stone” as a paradigmatic anthem—the debates about Dylan’s changes will place us at the center of an extremely big picture.

The ruts structuring such debates are a big deal. It matters, and not in a good way, that the rails of the film include Guthrie singing an old-timey “So long, it’s been good to know you” at the beginning and end. It matters how we answer an echoing question: which fractions of Dylan’s 1965 audience welcomed his changes (more than the film leads you to think) versus booing (overdramatized). It matters how much he left “protest” behind, as opposed to how much he re-articulated cultural critique in emergent ways. On this last crucial question, the film leaves us with an appropriately large and productive question mark.

At the end of the day, I found this film plenty good enough to think with. If you are a Bob bro, you probably already watched it, and have by now joined a chorus of “I expected this to suck but, damn, it was pretty good except for [insert pet issue].” If you aren’t a fan, it is a fine place to start. So please give my worries a pass. This film couldn’t possibly not oversimplify. Right at its foundation, it had to pick a few songs and nail them. It did build this base and more. Kudos! Just remember this is only the tip of an iceberg, a place to start and not a place to stop.