Bob Dylan

Source: Public Domain

The musical biopic A Complete Unknown competently depicts the most famous of the heel turns Bob Dylan has amused himself with over his long career: how he stabbed in the back his purist leftist folk music fans by going to their 1965 Newport Folk Festival and playing “Like a Rolling Stone” loud, fatally wounding the folk craze.

“Heel turn” is a professional wrestling term for when the audience’s hero, the “face,” suddenly turns into the villain, the “heel.” The influence of professional wrestling on this Nobel laureate in Literature with his august standing as the voice of ’60s authenticity, the auteur who proved you don’t have to be able to sing to be a singer-songwriter, is seldom brought up.

To his credit, however, Dylan has often been up-front about the flip side of his commitment to authenticity: the pervasive influence on his art of old, weird Barnumesque all-American showbiz hokum. For example, Dylan’s memoirs cite his brief meeting with Gorgeous George, the most infamous pro wrestling heel of the 1940s and 1950s, as galvanizing to his audacity. (Muhammad Ali was another American original inspired by encouragement from Gorgeous George.)

Dylan’s other heel turns include discombobulating his Jewish rock critic enthusiasts by temporarily converting to evangelical Christianity in 1978 and turning his back on leftism just as the protest movement was ascendant in the mid-’60s. As early as 1964, he sneered at his “Blowin’ in the Wind” days in “My Back Pages”:

“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

American communists had gotten themselves in bad odor by following the Kremlin’s line too slavishly. So, in the 1950s they emphasized folk songs, which were both undeniably American and fun to sing around the campfire. This open-source musical tradition, featuring a high proportion of songs by anonymous or forgotten composers, provided an appealing example of noncapitalist creativity.

Ironically, the dominant role in the folk fad of leftist ideologues like Dylan’s mentor Pete Seeger made it aesthetically conservative. In an era when the epochal potential of the electric guitar was being grasped, the folkies were ideologically committed to old-fashioned acoustic guitars. (Seeger, by the way, became a great conservationist whose finest political contribution was likely leading the fight to restore the ancient purity of the Hudson River.)

In contrast, Dylan, the son of a hardware store owner in Hibbing, Minnesota, grew up wanting to be a rock ’n’ roll star. Folk’s collectivist ethic was alien to Dylan’s egotistical individualism.

But then Elvis got drafted, and the rock craze faded. By the time Dylan talked his loving parents into subsidizing his taking a year off from being a frat bro at the U. of Minnesota to see if he could make it in music in New York (where Dylan would concoct tall tales about his background because his actual upbringing was so Midwest Wholesome), folk was the next big thing.

While A Complete Unknown’s recounting of Dylan’s four years in Greenwich Village, from 1961 to 1965, has plenty of plot (mostly involving Bob juggling various gorgeous girlfriends), it doesn’t have too much drama because his ascent to fame and fortune was so rocket-propelled. New York was full of talented and perceptive people like Joan Baez who recognized Dylan’s genius immediately.

Inexplicably, one avenue for conflict in the movie is left out: Nobody ever tells him, “Bob, I love your songs, but ya can’t sing.”

At a high point in professional specialization in American popular music, when Frank Sinatra crooned melodies composed by Jimmy van Heusen with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and arrangements by Nelson Riddle (e.g., the sublime “All the Way”), Dylan insisted on not only writing his torrential lyrics and his insidiously catchy tunes but also singing his own songs despite being, by the extremely high standards of that time, a terrible singer. Nobody mentions in the movie that Dylan is, objectively, no good at singing, which is perhaps due to the happy fact that Bob is still around to give his thumbs-up on the movie, which he has.

But the screenplay by director James Mangold (of the Johnny Cash Walk the Line biopic and Ford v Ferrari) and Jay Cocks skips that interesting subject.

Then the Beatles came along and Dylan quickly recognized the future and his role in it. Dylan could have skipped appearing at Seeger’s Newport Folk Festival, but he is a combative and vindictive guy, so he couldn’t resist rubbing his folk fans’ faces in his new electric style. (Dylan reminds me of Michael Jordan: Their motivation came from feeling disrespected, despite being the most respected men of their times.)

But, of course, Dylan wins in the end. And then even more people love Bob, because he is an American winner.

Musical biopics, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, are usually about how some brilliant songwriter, such as Ray Charles, finally Faces His Demons (i.e., gets off drugs) and then lives happily ever after…but what they don’t mention in the postscript is that after he knocks off the drugs, he never again composes another really interesting song. I mean, it’s wonderful that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys is still alive at 82, but his last big year was 1966.

Dylan’s life is lacking even that drama because he has kept chugging along, with many of his fans pointing to the 1990s as one of the high points of his songwriting.

In A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet is technically faultless at imitating Dylan. He doesn’t particularly look like Dylan (Adam Sandler thirty years ago would have been the best casting), but I couldn’t detect a wrong note in his intonations. The kid is a fine actor.

On the other hand, the fey Chalamet, like so many stars these days, is a theater kid born and bred to be a professional performer, so he lacks the masculine aggression and gravitas needed to show why other ’60s alphas like John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix acknowledged Dylan as their rightful king. Chalamet would instead be ideal to play Bob’s teenybopper acolyte/rival Donovan, whom Dylan vanquished in a famous face-off.

The best performance is by WASPy Edward Norton as the idealistic but hopelessly dweeby communist folk singer Pete Seeger.

In contrast, Dylan was by nature not a folk singer but a folk hero. Like Babe Ruth, who invented home run hitting by ignoring his managers, nobody could ever tell him what to do.

The last word of dialogue in the movie, as Bob roars off on his motorcycle, is that preeminent American value: “freedom.”