Play me some Dylan
Listen while they strike you down to the ground, maybe you'll catch a spark
These words, “I listened to ’em while they struck me down to the ground,” were spoken by Timothée Chalamet in his portrayal of Bob Dylan for A Complete Unknown (2024). It was the music of Woody Guthrie that struck Dylan down to the ground, and he hitchhiked himself halfway across the country to Guthrie’s hospital bedside so that he might “catch a spark.”1
Who inspires Bob Dylan? I think this is the fundamental question and premise behind the movie. I’m sure anyone who grew up in the 60s—not so much the kids, but really the adolescents and those emerging into new adulthood—has a story that goes something like, “The first Dylan song I heard was….,” or “I went to my first Dylan concert in….”; or maybe it’s just, “When I first heard him I felt….” I’m not part of this group, but it’s a testament to the brilliance of the film that I can feel the impact of Dylan on his time as if it was my time too. It’s not that he is confined to the 60s. Oh, no, I don’t mean that. Legends never die. What I mean is, it was the 60s that called for him, inspired him, nurtured him…. I want to say so much more on this point. What I like most about the film directed by James Mangold is the way it platforms the music and largely relies on the music more than anything else to tell the story. The actors are fine—more than fine. The screenplay is solid. The music, though, holds the key. Therein lies the essence of what inspires Bob Dylan and how he inspires us.
The only musician ever to win a Nobel Prize for literature was born to Jewish parents in Minnesota. His paternal grandparents had emigrated there from modern-day Ukraine. His maternal grandparents were also Jewish immigrants, but from Lithuania. The movie doesn’t look at his childhood. It begins with 19-year-old Dylan hitchhiking his way to New York. He was already Bob or Bobby Dylan, a name that felt more authentic to him than the one assigned at birth. He had a duffel bag and a guitar and barely enough for the cab ride across the bridge to New Jersey to visit his idol Woody Guthrie in the hospital. I’m glad the movie starts there, that it doesn’t attempt to drum up an interpretation of his early life. (That’s so Oliver Stone and I’m so glad this was not an Oliver Stone film!) Instead, it starts with the calling—his calling to another place, the calling to interpret the pain of the times in language only he could articulate. All the man himself says of his childhood is that it was neither happy nor unhappy, just wrong. “I always knew that there was something out there that I needed to get to. And it wasn’t where I was at that particular moment.”2
In the movie, he (Timothée Chalamet) tells the women in his life that he grew up (and learned to play the guitar) in the carnival circus. In the audience, we can feel it as the fiction that it almost certainly was. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) calls bullshit, but rolls with it. Elle Fanning plays the other lady in his life at this time, whose identity the real Dylan requested to be altered to “Sylvie Russo” for the film, although it is understood that she’s based on the artist Suze Rotolo. (She’s the woman snuggling with him as they walk down a New York City street on the cover of his album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.) Sylvie and Joan, as portrayed in the movie, were each in love with Dylan. He loved them too, but the songwriting was all-consuming. “I give her my heart but she wanted my soul,” he sings in “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.”3 He’s a poet, articulating truth and passion that we all relate to. He understands, but he cannot be understood? He knows but can’t be known. He’s a rolling stone:
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?4
He couldn’t stay with “Sylvie.” She wanted what is natural to want but is the one thing Bob Dylan cannot give. There’s the fascinating scene when Sylvie is pressing him to give more of himself and he says that “people make up their past…they remember what they want, they forget the rest.”5 That scene is followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, emblematic of the larger movement that is calling him. It was a world holding its breath, a world scared, a world confused. So he gave us “Masters of War.” Channeling the powerless, he sings to the titans: “You play with my world, like it’s your little toy….you fasten all the triggers for the others to fire, then you sit back and watch when the death count gets higher….”6 He met Joan Baez in the Movement, in the moment. She told their story in her own song many years later: “As I remember your eyes were bluer than robin's eggs, my poetry was lousy you said….”7
In the movie, he tells Baez that her lyrics are like an oil painting in a dentist’s office, overthought, ornate. Some poets might be offended. Baez was captivated. She joined in a duet, singing “Blowin’ In The Wind.” Here in the movie, Dylan becomes a real pain in the ass—but a lovable one, of course! We see a lot of Chalamet and Barbaro singing on the stage together, just like Dylan and Baez, the former becoming more petulant and the latter countering him as perhaps only she could. She describes him in her song “Diamonds and Rust”:
Well, you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms8
But the movie is not just about his love affairs. It’s a story of his relationship with Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the Newport Folk Festival that embraced him but ultimately broke with him as he moved away from traditional folk and became more undefinable Bob Dylan. It’s a story of fame gone awry. Dylan walks into a pub and gets mobbed, the mob goes nuts, he gets a black eye. It’s the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. He sought comfort in Sylvie. Don’t we all seek comfort in the past when the present hurts and the future is terrifyingly unknown? Still, onward rolled the rolling stone. His reversion to a past love made me think of his song “Shelter from the Storm,” but of course that song was much in the future.
The other relationship the movie shows us is the one between Dylan and his audience. They love him. He gives them his heart, but never his soul. He won’t be told what to do. He has to do it his way. It surprised me to see the Newport Folk Festival audience react so badly to his new songs. They went there to see Dylan, but they wanted to hear him play and sing the traditional stuff. If you want to hear some Dylan, it’s gotta be on his terms. He’ll give you his heart, but never his soul.
FOOTNOTES
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/a-complete-unknown-2024-transcript/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-bob-dylan-rare-interview-2004/
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/dont-think-twice-its-all-right/
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/rolling-stone/
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/a-complete-unknown-2024-transcript/
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/masters-war-mono/
https://g.co/kgs/iWxyncD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_%26_Rust_(song)