Can you dislike Bob Dylan and like the new biopic about him? The answer is yes, because I did. The question is why. I will attempt to answer this question now, so pull up a chair, because this could take a while.
Now, I should explain that I’ve had it in for Bob Dylan for about 56 of my 63 years on this earth; my older sisters had Dylan records when I was a little kid, and I just couldn’t stand his voice. In those days, especially if you were a kid, there was no escaping the deliberately rustic sound of a single voice accompanied by guitar or banjo or harmonica or all three; if it wasn’t Dylan, it was Phil Ochs or Burl Ives or the Weavers or Theodore Bikel on the phonograph with Americana like "Big Rock Candy Mountain" being poured into your ears like a bottle of Geritol into an iron-poor woman’s mouth.
A few years later, in my early teens, when I was made to understand that record albums were to the baby boomers what volumes of romantic poetry were to the Victorians, I did my best to accept that Dylan’s lyrics were akin to biblical prophecy—only to decide after much effort to brainwash myself that they were overwhelmingly pretentious gobbledygook. I am not so contrarian that I cannot acknowledge a person who can write "Blowin’ in the Wind"—a song so immortal from the moment it emerged from Dylan’s guitar that it sounds as though it has existed since the beginning of time—is a once-in-a-generation talent. The same can be said of the man who wrote the indelible music to "Tangled Up in Blue," even if Dylan has to prove the intellectual bona fides he does not in fact possess in that song by twisting and turning in the middle to shove in an allusion to Dante.
But I have also seen Dylan at his most unguarded, unlike most people, and my friends, that sight could not be unseen, even at a remove of 47 years. Unlike you and most people on this earth, I went to the four-hour movie he wrote and directed and starred in called Renaldo & Clara during its two-week run in New York in 1978 before he pulled it from circulation, never to be witnessed again, kind of like Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust clown movie.
The idea that the person who made Renaldo & Clara—a film of staggering amateurishness and self-parodic attitude—would one day win the Nobel Prize in Literature should have been as outlandish as the idea of me being named Pope. And yet that did happen, as things have always happened to Dylan, who somehow came in possession of a lucky lottery ticket at the age of 19 and has remained a legend even now well into his 80s when people go to see him in concert and come out—as they have for decades now—to report that the concert was horrible, that he can’t sing, that he mumbles, and that he now looks like their great-uncle Moishe just before Moishe went into the Hebrew Home for the Aged.
So why did I love A Complete Unknown? The answer is that it made me respect Dylan in a way I never have before—with the exception of a few weeks in 1983 when I found myself flabbergasted to listen over and over again to his song "Neighborhood Bully," then and now the most stunning defense of the state of Israel and the steps it takes in its own defense ever produced by our popular culture.
Why? Because the movie offers an inadvertent revelation that provides me with more than simply Zionist common ground with Bobby Zimmerman (fellow alumnus of Herzl Camp in Wisconsin, founded by my grandparents, by the way). The hidden story of A Complete Unknown is that Bob Dylan is a slayer of Communists—maybe not because they’re Communists, but I’ll take what I can get.
His rebellion against the elders in the folk movement of the 1960s was a rebellion in part against the static conformity and dreary humorlessness of the far-left politics that had dominated that corner of the music world for a quarter-century.
That is the secret hidden text of A Complete Unknown, the biopic in question, even if cowriter and director James Mangold might not completely grasp it. The not-so-hidden general theme of the movie is that Dylan is the inceptor of the new American age of the 1960s because he rebels against and ultimately rejects the expectations of elders and authority figures. What Dylan’s mentors, users, financial exploiters, and groupies want is the voice of social justice inveighing as he does against "Masters of War"—but a social-justice warrior is not what he wants to be. And this guy simply will not be what other people want him to be. In a genuinely brilliant performance, Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s combination of insolence, petulance, self-assurance, and hunger for authenticity without ever once trying to make the man even remotely endearing. In an equally brilliant performance, Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, seemingly kindly but deeply self-satisfied, the mentor from whom Dylan must break away to be free. Their dynamic is the beating heart of A Complete Unknown.
The times Dylan informed us that were a-changin’ were the times in which middle-aged men felt the power to order around younger men—and in his case, those middle-aged men weren’t middle managers at IBM but New York leftists ranging from Greenwich Village intelligentsia to wealthier types raising money radical-chic style for "emergency committees" of this or that or the other stripe. A Complete Unknown is a rise-to-fame tale beginning with Dylan’s arrival on a bus in 1961, his almost instant embrace by Seeger and the world Seeger dominated—and which he almost instantly began to find suffocating.
But what was that embrace, really? The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, no conservative to put it mildly, lays it out authoritatively in his 2010 book, Bob Dylan in America: It was the political aesthetic of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers, which had reached its entropic phase by the time Dylan stepped off the Greyhound. The world of folk music was, by then, led by a hidebound Establishment of its own that had emerged from the Popular Front—the effort, in the United States during the 1930s, to advance the interests of Stalin’s Soviet Union through the seizure of the high ground of culture.
It was led by an unreconstructed Stalinist named Alan Lomax, who worked out of the Library of Congress during the FDR era recording and storing and transcribing what he believed to be authentic working-class musical art unstained by bourgeois Kulak values in pursuit of revolutionary change. (He was assisted in these efforts by nepo daddy Charles Seeger, Pete’s paterfamilias.)
The key tunes of the time were the celebration of the radical Wobbly labor agitator Joe Hill and the anthemic "Which Side Are You On?" nominally about the Harlan County mining strike of 1931—but over time the "side" in question was the Soviet side in the battle between democracy and Stalinism.
A Complete Unknown concludes with Dylan’s betrayal of the aesthetic principles of the Popular Front through his embrace of electrified instruments—which an enraged Lomax and others considered a surrender to the capture of the youth vanguard that was supposed to save America from bourgeois conservatism by capitalist tools like the Beatles.
As preposterous as this seems today, 60 years after Dylan dared play a plugged-in instrument at a folk festival, Dylan going electric was a death blow. What Dylan was euthanizing was the Stalinist Popular Front, which produced bad art in service of an evil ideology and had a far longer run than it had any right to.
So if gobbledygook, pretension, and Renaldo & Clara were necessary adjuncts of this triumphant effort to take Pete Seeger’s banjo and smash it to bits like Bluto smashes the folkie’s six-string during the toga party in Animal House, they were worth it. Enjoy your Nobel, Bobby, and maybe I’ll see you at the Herzl Camp reunion. I’ll be happy to sing harmony with you on "Neighborhood Bully."