,a complete unknown“There is a rare Hollywood movie that has inspired a reckoning. Everywhere, on social media, in the mainstream media, or simply from the many people watching the movie, there is an exciting conversation happening – a kind of collective attention. /check who bob dylan Who he is, what he meant then and what he means now. What’s shocking is that very little of this is Dylan nostalgia – that is, boomers getting misty-eyed due to self-importance about “their” beloved icon. And if that were the case, it would be useless. (No one would hate this more than Dylan.)
The conversation Dylan has ignited is very present tense and lively, and very exploratory. It’s about the movie, but it’s bigger than the movie. It’s about everyone who has seen “A Complete Unknown”, or everyone who grew up with Dylan, looking afresh at the question: What Was It’s about him? What is its magic, its hold on us?
The reason why this question is still revolving in our minds, its answer is still mysterious. If you talk about the Beatles or the Stones (who, along with Dylan, form the holy trinity of 60s music gods who changed everything), their glory is infinite, yet in a clear way we can all feel it. Can guess what it was. The Beatles did nothing less than recolor the world’s DNA; We hardly need to convince them. The Stones were, for decades, called “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band”, and so they remained.
But ever since Bob Dylan arrived in 1961, there have been endless labels attached to him – protest singer, folk musician who “went electric” – that somehow fail to describe him and his place in the universe. It’s not that the labels are wrong. He started out as a protest singer; He went electric, and that was a game-changing, world-changing moment. But none of this, strangely, describes what is so excellent about Dylan. And what I love about “A Complete Unknown” – and what I think the film, in a way, almost underplays – is that it captures the magic of Dylan far beyond those pesky labels. Takes you further. It shows you that what was beautiful about him was something that couldn’t be expressed in words.
Many have noted that Dylan, such as timothy chalamet Plays him, a deliberately mysterious and obscure figure, who speaks in tossed epigrams and ornate esoteric asides. He doesn’t want to let the thing called conversation dominate him. When Joan Baez (Monica Barbero), who has become romantically involved with him, says, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” it’s this dimension of him she’s referring to—that competitively dismissing him. Except, he will reject her. Makes up things about her past (such as saying she joined the circus) and refuses to dwell on it, not even letting her boyfriend know who she is. The Dylan we see in “A Complete Unknown” is basically the too-cool-for-school indie-rock jerk. You better believe that Lou Reed – the most notorious asshole in the history of rock ‘n’ roll – snatched away a huge amount of that attitude from Dylan, as well as the essence of Dylan’s back-and-forth talking-singing style.
Yet if Chalamet’s Dylan was simply a masked man keeping his thoughts a secret, it might seem like he was doing it all for effect. yes that Is Kind of an ass, but what redeems it is that he doesn’t just come off as a mysterious enigma to those around him. that’s a mystery too she herself – An artist who shows everything that is going on around him but doesn’t even really want to explain it To she herself. This will end the mystery. When Bob in the film talks about what Woody Guthrie meant to him, the point is that Guthrie’s folk music touched this kid from Minnesota on a level beyond words and beyond explanation. What he heard in that music, and what he took from it, was fundamental: not “protest” but something richer, deeper and more timeless. An example of faith.
And it has to do with how we experience Dylan’s songs in the film: as expressions of an emotion that makes him not only a great singer-songwriter but also a great singer-songwriter. ForceA cosmic messenger. the message of his music Is Faith. That’s why his impulse to go electric is something that Pete Seeger-led folkies can’t understand. It’s not that they only like acoustic instruments. They Believe in Ideas: The Fight for Social Justice. Dylan does…and doesn’t. He believes in something more personal and unattainable: the ability of a song to transport us to a state of reverie, to take you to heaven.
One reason Dylan’s calculation resonates with me now is that it mirrors my own journey with Dylan. For many years, everything I knew about him, and everything I learned about him, got in the way of my ability to really listen to him. Growing up in the 70s, I owned many of his records and listened to them dutifully, but I always felt like I was missing something. Simply put, I couldn’t understand most of the songs, and it made me feel like I was a C student in Dylanology. What did those words do? MeaningI recognized that the “protest singer” label was one that had worn off over the years. But what he never got over was how the Boomers praised him as a “poet.” I never cared much for poetry; It doesn’t speak to me. And I felt like most of Dylan’s poems went over my head.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I really started listening to Dylan and encountering the great paradox about him: that his songs, most of the time, didn’t matter that much. I mean, they do and they don’t. My favorite Dylan album is “Blood on the Tracks” and there are days when I think Dylan’s greatest song is “Tangled Up in Blue.” I’ve heard it 1,000 times. But I don’t understand 90 percent of the songs. It’s a song that perhaps reflects his journey from innocence to counterculture and the world beyond, reflecting his journey to his marriage to Sarah Lownds, yet it’s not about any of those things. . the song is about Feeling Of this, of seeing the life you’ve lived, even if it’s winding back like a lost highway. And its sound is right there.
As I grew up, I became more aware that Bob Dylan’s genius was entirely about sound. His low voice on “Knock on Heaven’s Door”. The ecstasy of the harmonica solo in “Absolutely Sweet Mary”. The way he doesn’t just sing a song – he sees it, and caresses it and caresses it, and deposits it straight into your soul, even when you don’t know what it means. And when he went electric, he achieved a sound – unique in the history of rock – that was sweet and fiery at the same time. He lifted you up, not like Woody Guthrie but like JS Bach. No matter the subject, Dylan was singing religious music. It was going to rain heavily, but the miracle was that Dylan had captured that rain and made its reality beautiful.
Music is sound, and what Timothée Chalamet has captured with his exceptionally lived-in impersonation of Dylan is how Dylan used the sound of his voice, and the glorious percussive majesty of his guitar playing, and the mystery of his words. Used as a method. Touch the supernatural, carve out a privileged five-minute space in the universe in one song after another, and invite us to pour our emotions into that space. “A Complete Unknown” isn’t the greatest rock biopic (that would be “Sid & Nancy”), but it offers something unique in the world of rock biopics. It illuminates the sacred space that Dylan has created, allowing you to see it, hear it, touch it and be inside it, until you realize that this life is electric.