These are the facts: on the night of Sunday, July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan performed three songs with an electric backing band at the Newport Folk Festival, held annually in Newport, Rhode Island.
This is the myth: Dylan was roundly rejected by the audience, who found his performance an affront to all they believed and held sacred. They booed him overwhelmingly. This is what history has written: Dylan’s performance has come to represent a watershed moment in the sixties, a steamroller of modernity arriving to annihilate an outdated mode of artistic expression. In time, a narrative has accumulated around these boos, one of tragic small-mindedness as a crowd of confused, frightened sheep bleated anxiously, unprepared for what history had in store.
Said myth is somewhat uncharitable to the booers. As Elijah Wald points out in his book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Dylan, Seeger, and the Night that Split the Sixties, the booing, viewed from another angle, was the expression of a group of idealists who believed earnestly in the power of folk music to change the world. By this interpretation, Wald writes, “the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off…the booing pilgrims were not rejecting [the] future; they were trying to protect it.”
But, as folklorist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) snarls at Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) during the crescendo of Dylan’s electric set as depicted in A Complete Unknown, those hopes have been shattered. Seeger pleads that they could still pull the night—the festival; the dream—back together, while onstage, his onetime protegé peddles his noise. But no. “Together’s done,” Lomax snaps. “Your boy just tore it apart.”
This is the legend.
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A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s long-in-the-works biopic of Bob Dylan, climaxes with the electric set at Newport. But first, we meet Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) four years earlier, in 1961, arriving in New York City with nothing but a guitar and a dream of meeting Woody Guthrie, whom he finds in a hospital in New Jersey. There, slinking in by night, Bob encounters Seeger by the bedside of Socialist songsmith Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), now bedridden with the degenerative nerve condition Huntington’s Chorea. This scene has the quality of a storybook encounter, if not something outright sacred—the ailing father is attended by the devoted pseudo-son as a spirit some will soon call holy enters their midst.
Shortly, Seeger and Dylan will be established as two ideological poles, staking out their positions on the debate between folk and rock, which will rage throughout the story. Driving the itinerant Bob home to crash with his family, Pete bristles at the younger man’s affection for Little Richard.
“A really good song can get the job done without the frills,” Seeger sniffs.
“Sometimes they sound good,” Dylan, still a would-be Dust Bowl folknik, mutters under his breath.
The debate will continue, rock and folk colliding and contrasting throughout the film. At times, it threatens to tip the film’s theoretically even hand, as blasts of Dylan’s mid-decade rock are abruptly cut away from, replaced by Seeger’s hokey banjo plucking, an obvious, throat-clearing nod in the direction of the “superior” art.
This is the grudge match the film posits as the central dramatic tension of Dylan’s life between 1961 and 1965: whether to remain a member—mascot—of the folk scene, or whether to reject his friends and champions in order to chart a more iconoclastic path. “They wanna own me,” he wails, fleeing a party of folk intelligentsia who have just pressed a guitar into his hand and dragooned him into an impromptu performance. This Dylan refuses to be owned.
“You know him,” folkie Ronnie Gilbert said, introducing Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, “he’s yours.” This introduction is omitted from A Complete Unknown, with Mangold instead having Dylan debut “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the assembled masses—“Here’s a new one,” he drawls repeatedly throughout the film, underscoring how rare it was to present new ones in an era when the charts were still dominated by standards. The crowd takes to the song immediately, adopting the refrain by the time of the second verse, roaring their approval at particularly pointed lines. In the wings, the Newport board is beside themselves with joy. But Dylan’s face is haggard and haunted when the crowd leaps to its feet in approval. It’s one of a few moments in which the Newport audience is depicted as a faceless mass, something ominous, even when jubilant. This is a mob mentality, and Dylan is whipping them into a frenzy. He seems to know, and fear, it.
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Ronnie Gilbert’s ecstatic introduction before Dylan’s 1964 afternoon set is included in Festival! (1967), Murray Lerner’s documentary depicting Newport between the years 1963 and 1966—a time that encompassed Dylan’s only three visits to the festival before a half-century’s hiatus from that stage. In 1963, we see Bob in his denim and khaki; by 1964, those fashions have been replaced by a more beatnik-inspired turtleneck and blazer. And by 1965, he’s become what Todd Haynes—eventual cinematic interpreter of the Dylan legend—would call “a freaker,” with his mane of curls, his sunglasses, his loud polka-dots, his leather gleaming in the spotlight.
Lerner’s film is a feature-length collage, made up of what the director termed “juxtapositions,” and none are more poignant than the juxtaposition between the young folk sensation Joan Baez and her frequent onstage foil Bob Dylan. Baez is shown in the film to be poised and composed, at ease in a throng of fans, signing autographs while crooning a snatch of the Beatles. Dylan, for his part, hunches in the back of a car, besieged by fans on every side. “Where are all my friends?” he mutters. The two are shown as oppositional in their relationship to fame—a phenomenon to which Baez was more accustomed than Dylan, being the bigger draw at the time of their first meeting. But Joan’s polished warbles (“She sings pretty,” Chalamet’s Dylan smirks onstage, following Baez in his early Greenwich Village days. “Maybe a little too pretty.”) come as a clear juxtaposition to the more unpolished Dylan, who earns a standout moment in Lerner’s documentary when he takes the stage without his harmonica.
“Does anybody have an E harmonica?” he calls out to the crowd. “Anybody! Just throw them all up!” And then the soundtrack is overtaken by the sound of metal hitting wood as the stage is seemingly pelted by the audience’s loose harmonicas. It’s a moment of guileless charisma, the sort that earned Dylan all the awestruck gazes he’s graced with in A Complete Unknown, which feels at times predominantly made up of such moments of hushed amazement.
Murray Lerner’s Festival! was released the same year as another cinematic portrait of Dylan and Baez: D.A. Pennebaker’s classic pseudo-verité documentary Dont Look Back. Capturing a behind-the-scenes look at Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, the film depicts green rooms and hotel suites, with only occasional visits to the stage for an appetite-whetting portion of a Dylan song. Along for the ride were Baez and Bobby Neuwirth, a mischief-making friend of Dylan’s who sets his mind to tormenting Baez, mocking her throughout the proceedings (in one particularly savage moment, he remarks in her presence that she’s wearing “one of those see-through blouses that you don’t even wanna!”) until she unceremoniously departs the tour and the movie. In fact, her resentment was apparently less towards Neuwirth than towards Dylan, whom she believed might invite her onstage to accompany him—as she had a history of doing for him—despite his absolute disinterest in doing so.
Pennebaker’s film was significant in establishing the cinematic Bob Dylan, released a year after a motorcycle crash that remains shrouded in mystery, which caused (or, if one believes the conspiracists, allowed) him to withdraw from public life for nearly a decade. Into the vacuum of public Dylan came Pennebaker’s portrait, one that initially rankled Dylan—who perhaps objected to a few moments, like the infamous “Who threw the glass?” tirade, that showed him losing his carefully-maintained cool—before a second viewing soothed him enough to approve its release. Dont Look Back acquired a nickname in the Dylan camp, though: Dylan by Pennebaker. And a year after shooting that film, Dylan again enlisted the documentarian to shoot what he intended to be Dylan by Dylan, eventually titled Eat the Document. Commissioned by ABC television to make an episode of a short-lived anthology series, Dylan brought Pennebaker and co. back on the road, this time for a famously intense world tour (one detailed as the spine of Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home, which poaches much of Dylan and Pennebaker’s footage). Dylan served as director this time, relegating an ambivalent Pennebaker to the role of cinematographer. While gobbling amphetamines and enduring nightly jeers from the audience, Dylan directed an hour-long, utterly incoherent film that ended up rejected by ABC, languishing in obscurity forever (at least until the internet allowed for the dissemination of a degraded bootleg, now available on YouTube). Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott has described the film as driven by “a quasi-methedrine logic” that echoed “what Dylan must have experienced on this mixed up confusion tour.” This is about as kind as a review of Eat the Document is liable to get.
Dylan’s dreams of filmmaking would not be easily quashed. After a stint as a supporting actor in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)—a gig he took partially in order to learn more about big-budget moviemaking (“I’ll make a hell of a movie after this!” he crowed to the film’s star, Kris Kristofferson)—Dylan stepped back into his dual role before and behind the camera for Renaldo & Clara (1978), released as a sort of epic-length expansion of Eat the Document’s abstracted ethos. Now bringing cameras along on another tour, the famed 1975 leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, he assembled an even more entropic vision, a nearly four-hour monument to the arts of montage and nonlinear editing. A major fan of mid-century art films like Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945) (one detail James Mangold nails: Bob Dylan would usually rather go to the movies than whatever his other plans were), he believed himself equipped to shoot his own. Renaldo & Clara—which features neither plot nor story, and only gains brief narrative intrigue anytime Joan Baez, playing a variety of usually nameless roles, appears alongside Dylan (who at times plays someone seemingly named Renaldo) and/or his then-wife Sara (who at times plays someone seemingly named Clara). In surreal sequences powered by dream logic, Baez will materialize to pressure the Dylans, a seeming force of nature towards whom Bob still feels some compulsion.
To say Renaldo & Clara was savaged by critics would be to put it lightly. Pauline Kael described it as “a shocking miscalculation” made by a man “painfully out of key with the times.” The Village Voice sent no fewer than seven critics to review the film, six of them panning it while the seventh managed chagrined half-praise. “It’s droopy and disconnected, like a fuckless porno,” read James Wolcott’s Voice review. “It’s a monster movie starring Dylan’s ego,” read Karen Durbin’s. Mark Jacobsen did not mince words: “I wish Bob Dylan died,” he wrote, preferring the idea of Dylan’s annihilation and retrospective appreciation to the pain of witnessing subpar work. Following this appraisal, Dylan pulled the film from theaters. Apart from those intrepid enough to track down the full 232-minute bootleg online, Renaldo & Clara has been impossible to watch ever since.
Bob Dylan stepped away from his dreams of filmmaking for the remaining quarter of the 20th century, though he would not stay away. In 2003, he co-wrote and starred in Masked and Anonymous, directed by Borat and Seinfeld stalwart Larry Charles. Half as long as Renaldo & Clara but sometimes equally impenetrable, Masked and Anonymous takes place in an unnamed fascist state crumpling beneath the weight of compounding social crises. Into this morass walks Jack Fate (Dylan), a onetime counterculture hero now aged and irrelevant. Conscripted to play at a corrupt benefit show for vaguely-defined victims of the world’s horrors, Fate wanders through a script (one, as thoroughly detailed by Dylanologist Scott Warmuth, largely assembled/plagiarized from scraps of sources ranging from Spalding Gray to John Dos Passos) dense with philosophical rumination, non sequitur, and hokey comedy. Would you believe it was no better received than Renaldo & Clara? “There was a standing ovation when [Dylan] entered the room,” Roger Ebert reported of the Sundance premiere. “People continued to stand during the film, in order to leave, and the auditorium was half empty when the closing credits played to thoughtful silence. One of the more poignant moments in Sundance history then followed, as director Larry Charles stood on the stage with various cast members, asking for questions and then asking, ‘Aren’t there any questions?’” In his review for the New York Times, A.O. Scott warned the prospective viewer, “You may encounter people who tell you [Masked and Anonymous is] a stone masterpiece. The thing to do is nod politely. They mean no harm.” Yet the cult of Masked and Anonymous has never accumulated.
There tends to be tremendous significance to how Bob Dylan first appears in a movie. In A Complete Unknown, he’s presented from behind in the back of a car, obscured in half-profile as he scrawls in a notebook, hurtling backwards towards where he’s headed. This is an indication of how we should view this interpretation of a person who lives, in some form, in all our heads. Meanwhile, in his first appearance in Masked and Anonymous, he’s jailed. This is how he reintroduced himself to movie audiences: looming coolly out of a dungeon, the eternal sage (the “mysterious minstrel,” his girlfriend calls him in A Complete Unknown) now persecuted and repressed. In Renaldo & Clara, he first appears in a translucent mask, performing an entire opening number that teased audiences who rolled out to see their hero. In Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Peckinpah intentionally downplays the legendary visage gracing his film, introducing Dylan in long shots with little dialogue, this countercultural force seeping into a story dense with such symbolic portent. Peckinpah made use of the Dylan mythos, as any director who uses his image must be consciously playing with. There’s something too instantly recognizable about Bob, the electric Dylan being perhaps less potent a midcentury icon than Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, but likely only by virtue of the fact that he survived. When he strolls onscreen as a venerable old lion in Hearts of Fire (1987)—Richard Marquand’s disastrous A Star is Born retread—the camera pans up his body in awe before cutting to a bartender who’s seen overfilling a drink while he gazes in amazement at the superstar who’s just walked in. We know why. He may not be named Bob Dylan, but this character is Bob Fucking Dylan. We know what that means.
Just as we know what it means to hear the opening strains of “Farewell” in Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coens bend fact to place that 1963 song in Dylan’s mouth two years earlier, but it’s just too perfect a send-off for Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac, playing the fictionalized avatar of true Village scenester Dave Van Ronk), who’s ushered into obscurity by the appearance of Dylan. We don’t hear his name, nor do we get a good look at his face. But all we need to see is the silhouette of a skinny geek with scruffy hair to know something seismic has just collided with American culture, catching Llewyn and his ilk in the blast radius. When we lay eyes on the backlit Dylan, Richard Brody wrote, “we understand that [Llewyn is] knocked down, but this time he can’t get up…because Dylan has administered the decisive knockout blow. Llewyn will never be the same; the gig is now up.”
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A Complete Unknown is a film in conversation with Inside Llewyn Davis. Its opening shakes hands with that film’s close, reconfiguring Dylan’s arrival in the Village as a joyous touchdown on a scene teeming with vibrancy. Dave Van Ronk (unnamed onscreen but played by Joe Tippett as noted in the closing credits) wanders through the background of scenes debating the definition of folk with anyone who will listen. “We all keep rewriting the same song,” he insists at a party. But that’s not what Dylan does. As he attests to Pete on their first drive, “I don’t think of myself as a folk singer, folk music thing.” Chalamet’s impression descends into a sort of stuttered half-speech that’s hard to effectively quote. “I do sing folk music, but when I do it’s a modified version.”
The idea of modifying folk music is one that will stick in Dylan’s craw, first emerging in his compulsion to write original music even when the suits demand he play traditionals. This is short-sightedness, we’re shown, and the choice dooms his first album to weak sales until cooler heads prevail and he’s allowed to play his originals, soaring to the top of the charts, triggering a Richard Lester-esque bout of Bobmania, and changing (modifying) the face of folk music forever.
Yet the onscreen Dylan’s relationship to his own music remains curiously impenetrable. He’s shown to be a machine that compulsively produces songs—he repeatedly stays up by lamplight writing while his partners try to sleep; he tumbles into his apartment with “Like a Rolling Stone” pouring from his lips too fast for him to catch it on paper—but we have no idea whether he cares about this music, or any music in particular. He idolizes Woody Guthrie, a scratchy recording of whose “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh” opens the film, implying the words “I’ve got to be drifting along” are talismanic to Dylan. But we know what he dislikes (music, like Baez’s, that is “too pretty”), not what he likes. Never do we see him consuming the beat poetry that inspired Highway 61 Revisited, the album that seems instead born directly from his forehead, the better to burnish the image of Dylan as a transcendent genius. If the Dylan of the early ’60s was any sort of machine, it was one that consumed influence and regurgitated it in the guise of originality.
It’s telling that Baez performs “House of the Rising Sun” in her first onscreen appearance. This arrangement is identical to Dylan’s recorded one—which is to say, it’s identical to Dave Van Ronk’s, Dylan having brazenly ripped off Van Ronk’s signature, but as-yet-unrecorded, interpretation of the song for his debut record. To those familiar with this legendary musical pilfering, canonized in No Direction Home, Baez’s conspicuous performance of the same arrangement suggests Dylan may steal it from her, instead. It would be in keeping with a folk world that seems given to self-interested pillaging of one another’s material—Baez will call dibs on “Blowin’ in the Wind” the moment she hears it, and it will be she who makes it famous, a sticky-fingered choice for which she’s seemingly damned by the film. Yet Dylan couldn’t seem to care less whether Baez sings his song first; he couldn’t seem to care less about the music at all.
If Dylan’s conception of his own work is impenetrable, it’s arguably appropriate—is impenetrability not key to the Dylan mythos? And yet the film seems determined to puncture that mythos. Dylan openly explains the reasons for his code-switching. “People make up their past!” he roars at his girlfriend, Sylvie (Elle Fanning), when she has the temerity to suggest she might like to know about the life he keeps shrouded from her. “You think [the past] defines you?” Earlier, he has peddled his claims that he grew up on the road with the carnival, which Sylvie meets with credulity. But Bob is careless with his secrets, leaving out mail addressed to Robert Zimmerman during a party, with that mail’s contents including a hometown scrapbook. Sylvie is scorned by the friend who runs across it—how could she have believed a word Bob said? Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is savvy enough not to. ”The carnival,” she says with a cocked eye when he attempts the line on her.
So if this version of Bob is knowable, then why is his relationship to his own music so shrouded in vagueness? The only moment in which he seems to respond directly to his own creativity is when he appears in Sylvie’s apartment long after their breakup, hoping to ice his bruised face. “Everyone asks where these songs come from,” he tells Sylvie, “but if you watch their faces, they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.” This creativity seems to be something of a burden, and its source is mysterious. It’s an exciting thought—Dylan the preternatural genius who can’t walk down the street without a brilliant song falling from his pockets. There’s a kernel of truth to it, of course, but is it effective drama? Or is Dylan a cipher at the center of his own story?
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Dylan’s story has been told onscreen before, of course. There have been various onscreen pseudo-Dylans, from Hayden Christensen’s thinly-fictionalized Billy Quinn in George Hickenlooper’s Edie Sedgewick biopic Factory Girl (2006) to Eddie Marsan’s thoroughly unconvincing turn as 1993 Dylan in a 2017 episode of the British series Urban Myths. But Dylan has been played most memorably six times, all of them within one film.
Todd Haynes was apparently somewhat chagrined when he went to his longtime producer, Christine Vachon, with the idea of evoking Dylan as “a cluster of different selves” (as he later put it at the New York Film Festival). He “felt that that was really the only way to…get to something comprehensive and complex about who [Dylan] really is.” Haynes wasn’t granted an audience with Dylan to pitch his idea; rather, he pitched it to the star’s manager, Jeff Rosen, and son, Jesse Dylan, who agreed to pass along a single typed page’s worth of proposal for Bob to consider. They instructed Haynes to eschew any language along the lines of “voice of a generation” and instead focus on what would make his movie unique.
“If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced,” Haynes wrote to Bob Dylan, “a film that could open up as [opposed] to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation.”
To wit, there is no character named Bob Dylan in Haynes’s feature I’m Not There (2007). Rather, six characters inhabit elements of Dylan’s life and legend. Hewing closest is the story of Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), a singer of socially-minded folk who eventually flees the scene; furthest is the alternate early 20th century in which an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), having evaded Pat Garrett’s bullet, lives in obscurity on the outskirts of a town doomed to be demolished by progress. In between we find Robbie (Heath Ledger), the movie star who got famous playing Jack only for his icon to eclipse the folkie’s; Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), the little Black boy who playacts as a dustbowl rail-rider with scant awareness of the fact that it’s actually the dawn of the ’60s; Jude (Cate Blanchette), the effeminate but unambiguously male rocker on a head-spinning, drug-fueled, highly controversial electric tour; and, haunting the margins, a version of Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) seemingly subjected to authoritarian interrogation, which he parries with a variety of quotes pulled from Dylan’s interviews, Woody Guthrie’s musings, and elsewhere.
There is a consistent knock on I’m Not There: it’s an incoherent non-movie, fragmented to the point of abstraction, and, worst of all, yielding little if any concrete insight into Bob Dylan’s biography, let alone his psyche.
This, of course, discounts the film’s relatively obvious turnkey interpretation: this is Dylan’s life seen not from our perspective, but from within his own. The film opens with a point-of-view shot as the camera moves woozily down a backstage hallway, the crowd’s howling rising on the soundtrack. Due to the monochrome imagery, it’s easiest to interpret this as an extension of Jude’s story. But isn’t it more productive to consider that this film is actually occurring in a sort of psychic spasm as the 1966 Dylan prepares to step onstage? This opening bookends the film’s close, the only glimpse of the real Dylan, in which he pours his breath into his harmonica on that 1966 tour. I’m Not There, then, could be seen as a sort of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as Bob Dylan (to paraphrase Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the film that lampooned James Mangold’s prior rock biopic) has to think about his whole life before he plays. But, because Bob Dylan’s mind seems to be a freewheelin’ sort of a place, of course his subconscious would refract his own perceptions.
It’s also inarguable that the film has a codex: any biography of Bob Dylan. Because I’m Not There is, in fact, entirely coherent if one is decently familiar with the man’s life story. It just requires that one see the handshakes between storylines as purposeful, affective baton-passes in a linear jog through two decades of Dylan’s life. Woody represents the Dylan that Chalamet plays in the first act of A Complete Unknown, the preternaturally talented songsmith who spins tall tales to obscure the facts of his past. Woody, though, is shuffled offstage by the suggestion that he should “sing about [his] own time,” at which point Jack—who sings overtly about his own time—is born. Jack, though, is subsumed willingly by Robbie, Bob the callous sex symbol devouring Bob the voice of a generation. Robbie—whose story encompasses several decades, his marriage and divorce being a composite of Dylan’s key romantic relationships swirled together with Haynes’s personal musings on Dylan’s sexual politics—exists in parallel with Jude, the stress upon whom gives birth to Billy, the embodiment of Dylan’s urge to go into hiding between 1966 and 1974. Each new persona responds to, or perhaps protects, the previous one: Jude goes electric after the disastrous Tom Paine Award dinner, a real incident faithfully restaged with Jack, in which Dylan stood at a podium drunkenly denigrating and outraging a room full of aging liberals who’d assembled in his honor, framed here as a moment of high trauma for Jack/Bob.
The Tom Paine award dinner is elided in A Complete Unknown, as is the roughly contemporaneous release of a Newsweek article unmasking his true identity—bumped two years down the road and onto television but otherwise recreated directly in I’m Not There. Instead, Mangold’s cinematic Dylan is a mercurial genius first, bad boyfriend second, and that’s about where things end. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One (an unsurprisingly fragmented and fabricated work, little of which should be taken at face value), Dylan discusses gobbling poetry, holing up in the New York Public Library and testing his recall of increasingly lengthy works. “I had a feeling of destiny,” he writes of his time in Greenwich Village, “and I was riding the changes…My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch. One thing for sure, if I wanted to compose folk songs I would need some kind of new template, some philosophical identity that wouldn’t burn out. It would have to come on its own from the outside.”
In I’m Not There, much of Dylan’s artistic blossoming is implicitly credited to Suze Rotolo, his romantic partner during his Greenwich Village years (and author of the memoir A Freewheelin’ Time), fictionalized by Mangold as Sylvie and by Haynes as aspects of Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Rotolo brought Dylan to the sort of underground political theater Robbie is seen being taken to by Claire; in A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s poetry comes from nowhere—he prevents Sylvie from expanding his mind with Picasso’s “Guernica,” instead dragging her into a movie theater. For as much as it adores him, A Complete Unknown sees Dylan as the wrong kind of unknowable. Haynes grapples with the unknowability problem by presenting six knowable humans who stand in a ring around Dylan, interpreting and shielding him. Mangold, on the other hand, simply puts kōans and non sequiturs into his mouth, hands him an iconic novelty whistle, and trusts our prior knowledge of this music’s power to do the rest.
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This is the story according to James Mangold: Bob Dylan’s electric set at Newport is greeted by abject pandemonium. The crowd’s response verges on a riot, with bottles hurled from the audience to crash around the feet of Dylan and his band. One young woman even stands to shriek, “Judas!” In response, Dylan turns and snarls to his band, “Play it loud.”
This, as anyone with even a toe wet in Dylanology will be happy to pipe up, is a fast and loose approach to history: the famed “Judas!” incident came a year later, in 1966, in England, by which point booing a Bob Dylan show had become a fashionable way to spend a night out for trendy music fans across the world. And yes, Bob spat the somewhat more electrifying instruction to “Play it fuckin’ loud.” It’s an irritating thing to do, importing perhaps the iconic Bob-on-stage moment to place it conveniently within this story’s bookends—in a Rolling Stone cover story on A Complete Unknown, Edward Norton defended Mangold’s choice by saying the film was not “another documentary” but rather “almost a fable.” This is one way of saying the film mixes signifiers without much care for how they intersect with the cultural moment they choose to depict. Because, to be quite frank, the Judas moment doesn’t make a lot of sense in telling the Newport story. Because the crowd was not, in actuality, that worked up.
There was some booing when Bob Dylan went electric at Newport, and some of it had to do with Dylan’s choice to play with an amplified band. Yet many who were there that night have reported that the disapproval had as much to do with a poor sound system not wired for rock, earning the jeers from the audience simply on a technical level. Others booed Dylan’s choice to play just three songs when they expected a fuller set, enough to earn disapproval no matter who was playing what type of music. And then, of course, there’s the fact that many in the crowd did enjoy the set—in Lerner’s Festival!, the documented crowd response is an audible mishmash of noise, much of it clearly laudatory (Mangold dutifully includes a handful of audience members swaying appreciatively to “Like a Rolling Stone” amidst the barely-simmering mob violence). Lerner, for his part, later reported hearing “Applause, bewilderment, catcalls, and some booing.” But Mangold prefers the drama of the uniform assault on Dylan’s rock.
There’s something a bit baffling when Newport audience members begin expressing their shock and disgust at Dylan’s electric music. After all, he’s been playing rock and roll for the last hour of the film’s runtime, which has depicted him recording Highway 61 Revisited. It’s easy to forget the audience theoretically hasn’t heard this music yet, and that’s because this film is sequestered in the ivory tower of the folk world. From private parties at Bob and Sylvie’s apartment to planning sessions among the Newport board of directors, Mangold’s film is suffocatingly focused on the world of Dylan and his closest associates, providing very little context for how this music is impacting people, except for the fact that it makes girls scream and chase Bob down the street. This music was changing hearts and minds all over the world, but you wouldn’t know it—you’d know the music was popular, but not that it was respected. These blinkers make the Newport climax feel airless and confusing—if we don’t know what this music represents except that they like it, the boos are bovine.
Mangold pretty clearly takes a side in this whole story. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), Dylan’s drug-abusing Jiminy Cricket, instructs him to “track some mud on the carpet” as he takes the stage for the electric set, indicating that this demonstration is an act of productive childishness. Mangold grants Seeger and Dylan one last faceoff before that set, when Pete descends on Bob’s motel room early in the morning to deliver the “Parable of the Teaspoon Brigade,” a story apparently actually well-loved by Seeger. It’s a poignant moment—in effect, Seeger is pleading with Bob that he’s the only one with sufficient sway to bring new faces to their movement and, Pete truly believes, rid the world of so many of its ills. Yet by having Seeger deliver this message via a lengthy, droning speech, it’s all but impossible to focus on him. Mangold preferences showing Seeger as a prig rather than an idealist. Meanwhile, he surrounds Pete with Bob’s enablers, Albert Grossman and Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison), with the three men bouncing Pete around like a pinball. “Nothing’s changing!” the nihilistic Neuwirth snarls. “Kennedy’s dead. They just shot Malcolm X!” Grossman, for his part, argues that Pete is just scared—“You’re pushin’ candles,” he snaps, “and [Bob’s] sellin’ lightbulbs.”
Dylan is Edison. This is what Mangold cares about—not what was lost; not whether Seeger might somehow have been correct, that Dylan’s folk could have changed the world for the better. It’s not an idea the film cares to interrogate. Mangold couldn’t care less what folk represents—not to the festival board, ruled over by the bloviating, repugnant Alan Lomax, who mocks his supposed friend Peter Yarrow to his face. For sure, Alan Lomax was a purist who harbored frustrations with the urban folk movement. But those frustrations were grounded in his own idealism: a belief in the worth and power of American folk culture, an umbrella wide enough to encompass nearly any mode of self-expression so long as it represented, as he wrote with Carol Calkins in 1960, “the varied voice of our people crying out because they have something personal to say.”
Can rock, then, be folk? “The song I’m in hot water for,” Pete tells an ornery judge in his introductory scene—the only suggestion that folk could be anything but a fashion—“it’s a good song.” And, he goes on, “A good song can only do good.” The songs that will land Dylan in hot water in about two-and-a-half hours of screentime are good, too. So, Mangold believes, what can they be but forces for good?
And yet there’s something eerie and frightening about the night of July 25, 1965, as recreated by James Mangold. For his part, looking back on shooting the night Dylan went electric, Murray Lerner saw the entire affair as something ominous. “It was almost frightening when you saw it,” Lerner says on the special features included in Criterion’s release of Festival!. “He was becoming a high priest of this culture.” It’s fitting, then, that when Seeger goes looking for Dylan after the electric set, he finds the motel a swarming hive of onetime folkies now converted to the church of rock, dancing to Bob’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” as a faceless throng, figures as diverse as folknik Maria Muldaur and the story’s fictional blind Delta bluesman Jesse Moffette being drawn merrily into the undertow. It’s a good song. But is anything that turns people into such a mass doing good? Bob Dylan has united people—but to what end?
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Bob Dylan sacrificed his image to the world sometime in the first half of the 1960s. In fact, more than a star, he’s in the rarefied air of the superstar, as defined by dean of star studies, Richard Dyer. In his 1980 book Stars, Dyer wrote that such figures “are believed to be different in kind from other people…Stars are always the most something-or-other in the world…but because stars are ‘dissolved’ into this superlative, are indistinguishable from it, they become superlative…Their image becomes gradually generalized, so that from being, say, the most beautiful they become simply ‘the greatest.’”
This is the central thesis of A Complete Unknown: Dylan was—is, at least for a little while longer—the greatest. But he’s a man, too. And he does have the power of introspection, as well as an interest in conveying his own interiority. This, in large part, is what makes No Direction Home, Scorsese’s epic-length two-part documentary on Dylan’s life up to 1966, so compelling: here, at last, we have Dylan on Dylan.
“I didn’t really know if that song was good or bad,” Dylan says of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in one of many direct addresses to the camera. “It felt right. But I didn’t really know that it had any kind of anthemic quality or anything.” A small smile indicates that he knew exactly that. “I wrote the songs to perform the songs,” he goes on. “I needed to sing in that language, which is a language that I hadn’t heard before.”
It’s a fascinating, crystallized sentiment, but it’s beyond the scope of A Complete Unknown. The latest cinematic Dylan is a golden idol presented to us ready to be garlanded with acting awards. In their book A Companion to the Biopic, Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek describe the form as “undoubtedly the most hated of all film genres…routinely dismissed as bad art, shallow, formulaic, inauthentic, and disrespectful of history.” Yet we can’t seem to get enough of them, and we add Bob Dylan to the shelf of those who have received these handsome, tony treatments. One thing A Complete Unknown has little interest in: tracking any mud on the carpet. It ain’t that movie, babe.