{"id":268,"date":"2025-01-19T13:36:34","date_gmt":"2025-01-19T13:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=268"},"modified":"2025-01-19T13:36:34","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T13:36:34","slug":"random-thoughts-on-dylan-biopic-a-complete-unknown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2025\/01\/19\/random-thoughts-on-dylan-biopic-a-complete-unknown\/","title":{"rendered":"Random thoughts on Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown"},"content":{"rendered":"

It augured well when on the way to the cinema we passed a busker playing \u2018The Wicked Messenger\u2019 (how many buskers know John Wesley Harding<\/em>, in advanced years my favourite Dylan album?).\u00a0 This is not a review of A Complete Unknown<\/em>, not least as there are so many out there by cineastes far better qualified than me (best I\u2019ve read so far? James Parker in the January issue of the Atlantic<\/em>); simply a series of random thoughts by someone for whom Bob Dylan has been an ever-present since next-door\u2019s John Tilbury called me in at the age of ten to hear his new record.\u00a0 Distant memories of listening to the first album and the early Joan Baez LPs came flooding back when, early in the film, Dylan sings \u2018Song to Woody\u2019 to the man himself \u2013 it sounds pathetic but I was genuinely holding back the tears: this was my<\/em> music!\u00a0 OK, so most if not all of the hospital scenes with Woody Guthrie weren\u2019t as in the movie (the Guthrie family other than Arlo were initially suspicious of a post-adolescent Mid-Westerner seemingly obsessed with a half-forgotten folk singer brought down by Huntington\u2019s Disease) \u2013 but a lot<\/em> of the scenes are wholly re-imagined or didn\u2019t happen in the first place!\u00a0 This is a Bob Dylan biopic, so we wouldn\u2019t expect a linear, largely accurate narrative.\u00a0 The story has to be conflated, and events moved around or reinvented.\u00a0 If reports are right then Dylan stipulated that there must be a big \u2018joke\u2019 (apparently the same was true for Todd Haynes\u2019s brilliant I\u2019m Not There<\/em> nearly twenty years ago), hence the infamous shout of \u2018Judas\u2019 in the Manchester Free Trade Hall is heard at Newport a year earlier, with Dylan\u2019s instruction to The Hawks to \u2018Play it f\u2026\u2026. loud\u2019 duly replicated, sans<\/em> expletive \u2013 there follows a storming delivery of \u2018Like A Rolling Stone\u2019 but nothing as thunderous and malevolent as the version unleashed that night in May 1966.\u00a0 That said the band put together for when Dylan \u2018goes electric\u2019 is terrific, but I doubt if Eli Brown, looking uncannily like Mike Bloomfield, is actually playing that Telecaster.\u00a0 The choice of instruments is needless to say spot on, and the attention to period detail throughout the film is especially impressive \u2013 Greenwich Village is a more dynamic, action-filled environment than in the Coen brothers\u2019 Inside Llewyn Davies<\/em> (where Dylan is a looming present, waiting not quite off-screen to sweep away the old guard and the ever hopefuls).\u00a0 The conservative dress of most of the audiences is recognised, emphasising the continuity between the \u2019fifties and the \u2019sixties until well into the latter decade (reinforced early on by relocating McCarthyism and Pete Seeger\u2019s congressional indictment to the eve of Bob\u2019s arrival in New York).\u00a0 Timothy Chalamet\u2019s uncanny capture of Dylan the man \u2013 in so far as anyone can actually \u2018capture\u2019 Bob\u2019s ever-changing persona \u2013 has been rightly acclaimed, and on Radio 2\u2019s The Folk Show<\/em> he explained how an unintended consequence of the film\u2019s extended production, owing to the pandemic and the screenwriters\u2019 strike, was that he had five years\u2019 coaching in guitar and harmonica playing by the best in the business.\u00a0 No coach, however brilliant, could have trained Monica Barbaro to nail Joan Baez\u2019s voice in such a convincing fashion \u2013 that was instinctive, unforced and natural (is this the second movie depiction of Joan Baez, with Ronee Blakley playing her alongside the real JB in the truly awful Renaldo and Clara<\/em>?).\u00a0 One wonders what Joan Baez thinks of the film \u2013 and did Peter Yarrow get to see himself on screen before he died last week?\u00a0 Mention of Peter, Paul and Mary recalls how their inauthenticity is assaulted from both sides in A Complete Unknown<\/em>: by Dylan as he seeks a way out of the growing artificiality of \u2018the folk revolution\u2019 and the ultra-purist Alan Lomax, arguably unfairly demonised in the film.\u00a0 Yet the trio was Albert Grossman\u2019s biggest act pre-Dylan, with Baez \u2013 as shown in the film \u2013 refusing to leave the Vanguard label for Columbia.\u00a0 Dylan of course eventually broke with Grossman, but the latter by then had The Band to line his purse (no place for Robbie Robertson in the later stages of the film, with Bob Neuwirth portrayed as a more positive presence in Dylan\u2019s life than was actually the case, perhaps because drugs scarcely feature at all).\u00a0 Scoot McNairy is wholly believable as a still wild and vibrant Woody Guthrie overwhelmed by incoherence and paralysis (an echo of the most moving scene in the otherwise very funny Alice\u2019s Restaurant<\/em>), but the revelation is Ed Norton as Pete Seeger.\u00a0 As an echo of the man himself Norton\u2019s performance is so good it\u2019s almost eery, and if there is any justice then Norton will receive an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.\u00a0 The myth of Seeger at Newport trying to cut the power cables with an axe while Dylan plays \u2018Maggie\u2019s Farm\u2019 is acknowledged but not realised, the latter displaying a lighter touch than a clumsy scene early in the film where Dylan signals to Seeger that he\u2019s instinctively a rocker and can\u2019t be categorised.\u00a0 Three cheers for Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, whose portrayal is every bit as fragile and revealing as Joachim Phoenix in James Mangold\u2019s other music biopic Walk The Line<\/em>.\u00a0 In the latter Bob Dylan is off-screen and yet ever-present, driving Cash to embrace the new and to keep going even in his darkest moments; here the relationship is cemented and reversed, with Cash at critical moments suitably inspirational.\u00a0 Walk The Line<\/em> is a complementary movie, as is DA Pennebaker\u2019s documentary Don\u2019t Look Back<\/em>, shot in London during Dylan\u2019s last wholly acoustic tour \u2013 that\u2019s the real record of how appalling Dylan treated Baez while embracing Neuwirth as his new bro, working his way through industrial quantities of weed and speed, and accelerating towards breakdown or total reinvention.\u00a0 Ultimately of course he experienced both, culminating in his coming off that beautiful Triumph and retreating with his new bride Sara to Woodstock, Big Pink and the \u2018Basement Tapes\u2019 \u2013 and the rest is history (cue plug for my book Slouching Towards Big Pink<\/em> and the Dylan, Guthrie and Roosevelt \u2013 the story of a song<\/em> podcast: Dylan, Guthrie, and Roosevelt – the story of a song | Prof. Adrian Smith<\/a>).\u00a0 One final observation, playing the cantankerous bluesman Jesse Moffette is Big Bill Morganfield, son of Muddy Waters, whose performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960 was arguably as significant as Dylan\u2019s five years later, in recasting acoustic music as genuinely biracial and cementing the festival\u2019s cultural importance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It augured well when on the way to the cinema we passed a busker playing \u2018The Wicked Messenger\u2019 (how many buskers know John Wesley Harding, in advanced years my favourite Dylan album?).\u00a0 This is not a review of A Complete Unknown, not least as there are so many out there by cineastes far better qualified … <\/p>\n

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