In ‘A Complete Unknown,’ Bob Dylan’s Politics Are Blowin’ in the Wind

It might at first seem obvious why filmmakers won’t leave the subject of Bob Dylan alone. Search “Dylan” and “movies,” and the list — from documentaries like “Don’t Look Back” (1967) to fictionalized treatments like “I’m Not There” (2007) — turns out to be surprisingly extensive. The man was one of our most idiosyncratic and arresting artists during a revolutionary period in our popular music. And for all its diffidence and evasiveness, his was the work most often held up as Important — no small claim in the realm of pop music, especially then — and he was the one ratified as profound, even before the Nobel Committee’s intervention. What actor doesn’t want to play a charismatically elusive genius? What director wouldn’t like to imagine himself or herself as a kindred spirit?

But there are other reasons Dylan remains snagged in our collective consciousness, especially now. Though at least two of his songs — “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” — have been irrevocably shanghaied as the examples of Protest Songs of the ’60s, his more fundamental role might have been to serve as America’s political songwriter for the apolitical. The lyrics for the albums “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are not only irreverently funny and freewheeling in their pillaging of high and low culture, but they’re also sardonic, ambiguous and offhand. They’re the opposite of earnest, and when they point out problems, they do it with a shrug. Like many of his countrymen and women, he periodically registered with clarity or even outrage the state of the status quo, but he mostly dismissed any notion that he should extend his fretting over it.

Those two albums were recorded roughly in the period covered by James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” the most recent cinematic tribute to Dylan, starring Timothée Chalamet, and the latest stone added to the Everest of such works. Though the drama begins and ends with Dylan’s devotion to Woody Guthrie’s work, the movie makes vividly clear how much more anarchic and exciting Dylan seemed than folk music’s other standard bearers, singer-songwriters like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, since they were stuck not only lamenting injustice but also promoting an agenda for social change. Dylan’s lyrics, on the other hand, mostly seemed to suggest It’s All Absurd or, more pointedly, They’re All Assholes, a sentiment that adorned more than a few political lawn signs in 2024. A huge number of our cultural heroes, fictional and otherwise, have prided themselves on not being political, on their individuality as their ultimate value. Think of our western heroes, or our private eyes, or the way so many presidential candidates, the very definition of the triumphant insider, try to position themselves as outsiders. And as anyone who has attended one of his concerts knows, the central characteristic of Dylan’s career has been to not do what’s expected of him, even to the extent of putting out one of the most godawful Christmas albums in the history of the genre. Dylan’s version of rebellion much more resembles that of Brando’s in “The Wild One.” When asked, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Brando famously replied “Whaddaya got?”

In “A Complete Unknown,” that same orneriness causes Dylan to rebel against the expectation that he will be a crusader for social justice, a rebellion we’re encouraged to support. Bob Dylan should be allowed to be Bob Dylan, after all, and we Dylan fans know that going electric enabled some of his greatest music. Poor Pete Seeger and Joan Baez are portrayed as sweet and well meaning but also comparatively pallid and hopelessly unprepared for the ferocity of the tumult that’s about to upend American life. But while valorizing yourself as unwilling to dance to someone else’s tune might make you sound like a revolutionary, and even make you sympathetic to revolutionary impulses, it also most likely leaves you poorly suited to contributing to collective action.

Back in 1994, Noam Chomsky demolished Dylan as the model of the progressive artist, putting his finger on what the enshrinement of the personal cost him:

He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley “free speech movement” and said that he didn’t understand it. He said something like: “I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period.” If the capitalist PR machine wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn’t have made a better choice.

Dylan’s more fundamental role might have been to serve as America’s political songwriter for the apolitical.

Americans like to consider themselves no one’s stooges — Rick in “Casablanca” or the Ringo Kid in “Stagecoach” may say they wish to be left alone, but they also pride themselves on knowing what’s what, and on the knowledge that they would intervene if it became necessary. But the hands-on work of organizing at the grass-roots level for a better tomorrow? That’s not for the hero.

At its best, “A Complete Unknown" is not so much about Dylan as about how we react to Dylan: Some of the most galvanizing and successful scenes, like the ones in which we see the first takes of “Highway 61 Revisited” or “Like a Rolling Stone” coming together in the recording studio, capture the exhilaration of encountering his music at its apogee. Mangold’s visual style, which feels unhurried in its focus on the performers, maximizes that pleasure. Timothée Chalamet evokes an aspect of Dylan remarked upon in one of the first flattering reviews he received in New York — that he looked like “a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik.” Chalamet presents him mostly as a semi-amiable cipher (which shouldn’t surprise us, given the movie’s title) who just wants to play his music and be left free of everyone else’s ambitions for him. And to a large extent we’re willing to grant him that grace, even if presenting himself as political was crucial to how he became the phenomenon that provided him that space and power in the first place. Chalamet’s Dylan takes a sly pride in being provocative and off-putting but underplays the wit and only lightly touches on just how self-serving Dylan’s progressive gestures at that moment in time might have been.

That shrug of surrender spoke to many then and may resonate with even more now. The political nature of Dylan’s work has no doubt been an exhaustively contested issue among Dylanologists for decades (I have to assume, since I’m not one). But why shouldn’t we separate a work’s effects from its creator’s intent, or even its creator? The more radical members of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, took their name from a lyric from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman/to know which way the wind blows.” But that entire song is about both registering society’s oppressive reach and then offering opting out as the only solution: Those intending to go on the Freedom Marches, for example, probably found advice like “Better stay away from those/that carry around a fire hose” of limited utility.

Ultimately, “A Complete Unknown,” in its determination to focus on the music and remain noncommittal about politics, echoes its subject’s preferences. At the end of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Don’t Look Back,” about nearly the same period, Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, teases him as they take a limousine away from his triumphant performance at the Royal Albert Hall. The British press has taken to calling Dylan an anarchist because he doesn’t offer any solutions. And Dylan seems struck, but not particularly put out, by the news. He smiles and says: “Give me a cigarette. Give the anarchist a cigarette.” And having gotten what he wants, he spends the movie’s final moments with his chin in his hand, gazing neutrally out the limousine’s window.

Source photographs for illustration above: Searchlight Pictures; Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures; Jerry Schatzberg/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.