A Complete Unknown: Bob Dylan on Screen

Bob Dylan: prolific songwriter, Nobel Prize winner, the subject of Timothèe Chalamet’s upcoming endeavour on screen. Whatever his name means to you, amidst the build-up to A Complete Unknown, it is a good time to learn more about the man and why his playing of electric instruments rather than acoustic was such a big deal in 1965. 

From Duluth, Minnesota to the heart of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York — Bob Dylan’s rise to folk stardom between 1961 and 1963 was nothing short of exceptional. Amidst the civil rights and antiwar protests of the early 1960s, Dylan recycled the folk seeds of Woody Guthrie that had been sown in his mind and spread them to the masses in a newly-packaged folk revival that, unlike his McCarthyism-impacted predecessors, came to flourish in popular form. Songs such as ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, a pointed condemnation of the racist evils that the American justice system had failed to punish, became anthems for the young faces attached to these protests. 

However, this meteoric rise had type-cast Dylan in a role that he never auditioned for. Much to his displeasure, the media had proclaimed him to be the premier spokesman of his generation. In an act of mutiny against the ‘do’s and dont's’ of the folk scene, his fittingly named fourth studio album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, contained a critical lack of “finger-pointin’ songs.” This new path was self-focused, far more abstract, and far less explicitly political. His next album, Bringing It All Back Home, followed this new direction, providing an even more evident precursor to what would unfold at the Newport Folk Festival that year. Not only did this album delve into abstract existentialism rather than politics, the record’s two sides were also divided between predominantly solo acoustic performances and songs with an electric band. By the recording of Highway 61 Revisited, the solo acoustic guitar and harmonica that once exclusively backed his words were lost to a folk-inspired fusion of blues and rock-n-roll. The folk purists that thought they had Bob Dylan nailed on were wrong and angry about it.

The culmination of this betrayal was the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. As Dylan’s brazenly loud band sent electrically powered notes into the ears of the folk scene’s most allegiant followers, an onslaught of mass hostility and violent ‘boos’ erupted from the crowd. Although there is some doubt as to the extent of this reaction, with sound engineer Joe Boyd stating that the ‘boos’ were only heard amongst a wall of many sounds, Dylan himself certainly felt that this was the case. This would be the last time the festival would host Bob Dylan until 2002, reflecting a clear breakaway from the folk scene that he had been to this point dearly associated with.

Dylan’s reaction to this violent ordeal was to embark on a world tour in which he would play half of his show solo and the other half with an electric band. Accompanied by the Hawks, the second half of his performances were met with outbursts of anger and disgust from the folk purists in the audience, with one audience member in Manchester even shouting “Judas!” Similar reactions were displayed throughout this tour, which would be his last until 1974. However, this by no means reflected a declining popularity of his music. Rather, it marked a polarising transition from one phase into another; something that Bob Dylan would do time and time again throughout his sixty-two-year (and still ongoing) career. In the same way that he had been boxed into a spokesman role, the media would again elevate Dylan’s new style to a position that made him uncomfortable. The notorious reclusivity and constant redefining of his musical identity is, in a way, the result of being hounded from all sides — undying praise and intense criticism alike. 

So why would Bob Dylan annotate the script of A Complete Unknown, let alone approve this movie being made? A Bob Dylan biopic is inherently ‘un-Bob Dylan’. But, maybe this assumption is part of the wider problem. What is and what isn’t ‘Bob Dylan’ is something that the man himself has constantly redefined at his own will. After all, who would have expected to see him in a Victoria’s Secret TV advert in 2004? More likely, his approval is a sign that the movie will not fall into the tired tropes of ‘cradle to grave’ biopics, and will instead, hopefully, bring a specific time and place from his remarkable life to the screen this December. 

Illustration by Isabella Abbott