One of Bob Dylan’s greatest tricks, in a career full of them, is his endless provocation of academic charlatans, credulous journalists, and his army of Aspergerian superfans. Those opaque lyrics and infrequent interviews—full of tall and contradictory tales, deeply entertaining and obviously false—have left a trail of breadcrumbs that lead off a cliff. Nevertheless, this has somehow managed to produce reams of overdrawn academic interpretations (“the jurisprudence of Bob Dylan!”) and the occasional chin-stroking film portrait (It’s Cate Blanchett as young Bob!).
When I uncovered pop science writer Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications about Dylan in 2012—invented quotes from nonexistent archives that supposedly identified the “neuroscience” behind Bob’s genius—I was surprised that Lehrer hadn’t dismissed his own fabulism as a meta-tribute to a great fabulist. Why make anything up when interpreting a man who made everything up? With minimal quote-mining, one can create endless iterations of Dylan: left-wing or right-wing, evangelical Christian or messianic Jew, civil rights activist or subterranean racist.
A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold’s biographical film charting Dylan’s early career, from his 1961 arrival in New York City to his infamous 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, provides a necessary and slightly boring corrective. At last, a straightforward and unpretentious vision of Dylan, respectfully sanitized by Hollywood and supposedly sanctified by the man himself. But it misses a major point about the man and the political scene that fostered his talent—and why he broke with it to go his own way.
A Complete Unknown has a clear and unpretentious premise: A baby-faced Minnesota troubadour comes to New York City, fast becomes a star in the folk world, which he abandons upon discovery that it’s a fusty and creatively stultifying scene, inhabited by self-serious poseurs. Out with the acoustic guitars, the cosplay songs about unions and labor strife, and an apostate Dylan will “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Cue the outraged purists, eager to criticize what they don’t understand, who try to cut the power as he plays “Like a Rolling Stone.”
When I left the theater with my 13-year-old daughter, she rendered her judgment of A Complete Unknown with a shrug, confused by the film’s dramatic crescendo, when a famous solo musician decides to play with a band who play amplified instruments. So what’s the big deal?
A Complete Unknown isn’t that interested in clarifying this point. Because the film almost entirely ignores politics. And it should ignore Dylan’s politics, whatever they might be. But it makes an unforgivable error in ignoring the politics of his Greenwich Village confederates who adhered to the Maoist dictum that art must serve the people, avoid manifestations of the individual, and reject commercial concerns.
As one critic complained in the aftermath of Newport, for the new, electrified Dylan “the words [matter] less than the beat.” What he “used to stand for, whether one agreed with it or not, was much clearer than what he stands for now. [Which is] maybe himself.” Irwin Silber, the rigidly Communist editor of Sing Out! magazine, the in-flight magazine of the radical folk scene, excoriated the New Dylan for having abandoned political songs in favor of “inner-directed, innerprobing, self-conscious” music. Decades later, Silber reflected on his criticism by acknowledging that his “biggest concern was not with the electricity. . . but with what Dylan was saying and doing about moving away from his political songs.”
Dylan was so desperate to slip out from folk’s rigid ideological strictures that he would simply deny the politics even of his most transparently political songs. “Blowin’ in the Wind” wasn’t topical but “just a feeling I felt because I felt that way.” Already in 1964, he would shrug at a song he wrote about the lynching of Emmett Till, “which in all honesty was a bullshit song. . . . I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony.”
It would become a mantra for the next 60 years, recited to every interviewer who blubbered about sitting across from the voice of a generation. “I’m not politically inclined,” he told one interviewer. “My talent isn’t in that area; it’s just to play music.” As for “the ’60s” as a political thing, he was unforgiving: “I don’t care one bit about the ’60s. . . I know it was a time of great upheaval in the world, but still I don’t care about them. . . I didn’t grow up in the ’60s, so Bob Dylan the ’60s protest singer isn’t me at all.”
Dylan might have had no politics, but his two love interests in A Complete Unknown, girlfriend Suze Rotolo (rendered in the film as “Sylvie Russo”) and fellow folk singer Joan Baez, were firmly on the radical left and pushed him toward a more political songbook.
Mangold’s Baez, played by the enchanting Monica Barbaro, watches his musical transformation with resignation. But looking back on those years, the nonfiction Baez admitted that she “wanted [Dylan] to be a political spokesperson. . . to be on our team,” and complained in her memoir that his “active commitment to social change was limited to songwriting,” dinging him for never going on a protest march or engaging in civil disobedience. In 1972, long after he had abandoned political songwriting, Baez released the single “To Bobby,” a cringe-inducing excoriation of Dylan for not sharing her political priorities, which munificently ends with a promise that if he returned to the political fray, God “will forgive you.”
There are no real villains in A Complete Unknown—because no one believes in anything, beyond a love of acoustic instruments—but Pete Seeger comes close. The author of folk staples “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Seeger is correctly portrayed as the grand old man of folk, generous in his nurturing of a once-in-a-generation talent, but so opposed to his turn toward traditional rock music that, in the film’s final scene at the Newport Folk Festival, he has to be restrained from cutting power to Dylan’s amplifiers.
Seeger’s gentle cadence and friendly countenance are matched perfectly by Edward Norton, but viewers are left unaware that his anger toward Dylan could be divined from his slavish devotion to a particular strain of totalitarianism. Perhaps a line or two indicating that Seeger defended Joseph Stalin throughout the genocidal Ukrainian famine, the bloody purge trials, the antisemitic “Doctor’s Plot,” the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany, and their subsequent dismemberment of Poland.
In his memoir, Seeger half-heartedly apologized for supporting Stalin, who he had variously called a “heavy-handed,” “hard driving” leader who engaged in an “awful lot of rough stuff.” This was wrong, he acknowledged in 1993, amplifying the criticism only slightly, because he turned out to be “a supremely cruel misleader,” too. (Historian Ron Radosh, who took banjo lessons from Seeger and maintained a contentious friendship with him over the years, criticized his former mentor for singing about Nazi concentration camps but ignoring the Soviet gulag. After the Cold War ended, Seeger would ultimately concede the point to Radosh. “I think you were right,” he wrote in a 2007 letter, including in his letter the lyrics to a new anti-Stalin ballad. But he would never perform the song publicly.)
Seeger would consistently claim that his attempt to shut down Dylan’s electric set at Newport was merely an objection to excessive amplifier volume and poor sound quality. But in the days after the show, he scribbled a note to himself, complaining that Dylan’s voice had turned into a “snarl,” that his new music was “destructive,” and predicted his newer, nonpolitical songs would soon be forgotten (“Who is going to sing them? And for how long?”). It wasn’t the crackling feedback or the plugged-in guitars. It was political. After all, Stalinists aren’t generally known for their broadmindedness.
A few months after Newport, Seeger would leave the controversy behind, as he headed out on a tour of the Soviet Union.
Dylan was becoming too big to care, but “going electric” meant he would be blacklisted by those who wrote songs denouncing political blacklists. Seeger’s sister Peggy, who co-owned a music venue in London with folk singer Ewan MacColl, spurned Dylan because “at that time we were singing pretty much folk songs or highly political songs in our club.” For good measure, MacColl said Dylan should be shunned as “someone who doesn’t really want to change the world.” (MacColl’s desire to change the world meant a continued defense, up until his death, of his original 1951 composition “The Ballad of Stalin,” a banjo-driven celebration of a leader he judged “the best the world has ever seen.”)
If any surviving Dylan antagonists want to reignite these long-forgotten purity battles, they will doubtless point out that Levi’s has partnered with A Complete Unknown for branded jackets and jeans. This will inevitably precipitate another round of clueless “Dylan sells out” discourse, with the requisite reminders that he made an exclusive deal with Starbucks in 2005 to sell his music; that he has his own brand of whiskey (“Heaven’s Door”); that he rarely gives interviews but will show up on an episode of the reality show Pawn Stars, or deliver a patriotic (and protectionist) sermon in a Super Bowl ad for Chrysler, or hand his cowboy hat to a lingerie-clad model in a Victoria’s Secret ad.
Perhaps, say his defenders, it’s all an elaborate performance piece. The great cipher is keeping us guessing. Or perhaps the truth is more prosaic. Maybe the Hollywood portrait is a better reflection of the real Bob Dylan. He doesn’t do purity tests. He doesn’t believe his music is too sacred to sell cars or booze or coffee. He isn’t—and has never been—an activist. He doesn’t care about your causes.
“He was not interested in the true nature of the Soviet Union, or any of that crap,” said the Marxist folk singer Dave Van Ronk. “We thought he was hopelessly politically naive. But in retrospect, I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.”
