The Stuff of Legends
A Complete Unknown Breathes New Life into Dylan Legacy
A good movie leaves me hungry to learn more. A Complete Unknown was no exception.
Full disclosure: I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan. I was a young teen during this film's 1961 to 1965 time capsule. But I knew the broad brush strokes of the story – the iconic folk songs and performers as well as the upstart revolution of electric guitar and rock music. I lived the confusion of growing up in a country caught in the throes of protest and angst, assuming it was normal.
A Complete Unknown opens with 19-year-old Dylan (a.k.a. Bobby Zimmerman) traveling from his Hibbing, Minnesota, home with an acoustic guitar to New York City for his rendezvous with destiny. Sitting alone at a Greenwich Village diner counter, he listens to an esoteric debate among nearby diners as he unfolds a news clipping from his wallet about an ailing Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital.
I had no inkling that Dylan idolized Guthrie, and admired Pete Seeger. Like many others my age, I sang along to Seeger's songs, Turn, Turn, Turn and If I Had a Hammer, but I didn't recognize them as galvanizing anthems for the causes of world peace, labor, and civil rights. Yet A Complete Unknown flashes back to a broadcast news clip of Seeger being called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955 for his membership in the Communist Party decades earlier.
Dylan's driving ambition propels him into the folk music world of Guthrie and Seeger at its apex, and they recognize in Dylan a kindred soul with a burgeoning genius.
The professional and personal relationship between Joan Baez and Dylan was a surprise, too. As we meet her in the film in 1961, she's already a rising star. Two years later she sang We Shall Overcome at the March on Washington, and was arrested twice in 1967 for civil disobedience.
You could have knocked me over with a feather at the moment during the film when I realized Dylan had a significant friendship (and occasional musical collaboration) with country music icon Johnny Cash.
Others Popularized Dylan's Music
The biopic is based on the book, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald. The title refers to Dylan's 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Music Festival. This pivotal concert was news to me, even after visiting Newport for the first time last year. (Unsurprisingly, the film takes liberties with the sequence of events and compresses its timelines.)
As it turns out, many songs written by Dylan were covered by other musicians more prominent in the soundtrack of my young life: It Ain't Me, Babe (the Turtles, 1965); Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man (the Byrds, 1965); and The House of the Rising Sun (the Animals, 1964).
Blowin' in the Wind, released in 1963, raised questions of war, peace, and power during the growing Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights demonstrations:
How many times must the cannon balls fly
before they're forever banned?
How many years can some people exist
before they're allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head
And pretend he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
the answer is blowin' in the wind.
Like a Rolling Stone, released in 1965 on Dylan's confrontational album Highway 61 Revisited, inspires the movie title:
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone
And the defiance and rebellion sparked by the Vietnam War was articulated in The Times They Are A' Changin' (1963):
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land,
And don't criticize what you can't understand,
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin'
Many of his songs about relationships still evoke poignant memories. I listened to Don't Think Twice It's All Right (Covered by Waylon Jennings in 1970) at a grad J-School house party in Columbia, Missouri, in the mid-'70s, as we were about to go our separate ways. Paul K. was sitting on the floor across the room, and I finally accepted that his on-and-off flirtation with me never would amount to more.
I ain't sayin you treated me unkind,
You could have done better, but I don't mind.
You just kinda wasted my precious time.
Don't think twice, it's all right.
(He did meet up with me out of the blue when he came through Des Moines years after we both were married and had children. Go figure!)
1960s Split by More than Music
A Complete Unknown delineates Dylan's growing discomfort of being boxed in after his meteoric success in folk music, as well as his undeterred ambition to explore new musical influences. True to his reputation, he's not portrayed as a kind human being, friend, or lover. He's welcome to remain an enigma. I can appreciate his talent without the baggage of his back story.
The film suggests that Dylan's disruptive performance at Newport heralded the demise of folk music and the acoustic guitar. But Rock n' Roll (Elvis and Buddy Holly) already had gone head to head with folk. And one year after the 1965 Newport Folk Music Festival, I watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and before long showed up at school with a Beatle mop haircut. Jimi Hendrix set his Fender Stratocaster on fire at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. It was much more than a battle between acoustic and electric music fans.
If you haven't seen A Complete Unknown yet, invite a member of the younger generation along, and then lean back to enjoy the commentary. We saw A Complete Unknown with our younger daughter and her husband. Their questions began with the film's 1961 broadcast news clip of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As we discussed on the drive home, so much else defined – and divided – Americans during that period: the Vietnam War, the Feminist Movement, Black Power, and the drug counter culture.
"There was so much going on in the 1960s to make a movie about," our daughter commented. "I don't think there ever be a movie about a time like that in our lives."
But I'm not so sure. The Me, Too Movement in 2006 reflected the continuing struggles of the 1960s Feminist Movement and the election of the first African-American president of the U.S. in 2008 dredged up racial prejudices. At the age of 92, Pete Seeger, leaning on two canes, led a 2-mile march through New York City to support of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. And there's so much more:
· the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer in 2013
· Michael Brown's murder by a police officer, and Tom Morello's release of Marching on Ferguson in 2014
· the election of Trump in 2016
· the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer, caught on video and watched by millions of Americans on TV
· the massive eruption of Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S. after Floyd's murder
· the growing rejection of life-saving Covid-19 vaccines and science beginning in 2021
· the Stop the Steal conspiracy, and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol to disrupt the Electoral College vote
· migrant surges into the U.S., beginning in early 2021
· the growing crisis of homelessness
· passage of state anti-transgender legislation
Wouldn't you say there are echoes of the 1960s? Who can predict what else lies ahead during the next four years?
Maybe it's best to see A Complete Unknown without many of the expectations Dylan rebelled against. But it captured my imagination, and sent me down the rabbit hole of '60s history. You may not gain more insight into Dylan, but A Complete Unknown is an impressive retrospective about where we've been as a country, as well as a springboard for discussion about where we're headed.
And if you completely disagree, simply disregard this column. In fact, Don’t think twice, it’s all right.
Excellently written, Cheryl!!
You’ve really gotten me interested in seeing the movie now, Cheryl. I feel so lucky to have been growing up during the 50s, 60s and 70s. There was so much going on and making social change seemed achievable. Those times impressed upon me the importance of being politically active. Still am, fifty years later.