Underwhelming as biopic, perfect for hiding on TikTok

OKAY, let me start by stating that I found the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown very underwhelming.

I wouldn’t call myself a Dylan fanatic, but I am certainly a fan. I mean, it’s hard to underestimate his importance for the transition of pop music from teenage fodder into serious art. And although many of his tunes have clever and catchy melodies, he mainly did it through his words – he was the one who brought intelligent lyrics into the realm of popular culture which until then had evolved around exciting but meaningless lines like “AwopBop-AloobopAlopbam-Boom".

Dylan and his voice signified the arrival of a poet and a free spirit, a rebel and a visionary, a surrealist and an outsider. Or as George Harrison, the first Beatle to “dig" Dylan’s importance, once said: “Some vital energy, a voice crying out somewhere, toiling in the darkness." 

Another interesting quality, which has nothing to do with his music, is that it has been impossible to pin him down, to get all the biographical details right. From the moment young Robert Zimmerman set foot in New York in January 1961 and properly became Bob Dylan, he made up stories about himself, his past and his background (what we do know is that he was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota). Dylan is a crazy storyteller, a ghost, who would be increasingly opaque in interviews and press conferences, and who would let no one get near his private life. The other (and much more interesting) Dylan biopic was aptly titled I Am Not Here.

Good on him. TikTok and Instagram are perfect platforms for someone who wants to stay elusive and constantly change their identity. So it didn’t come as a surprise that Dylan, at the tender age of 83, has joined those two platforms. He uses TikTok to promote A Complete Unknown (he gave the movie his approval), so it will surely reach a younger audience than us outoppies who grew up with him and are familiar with his long meandering career – from protest singer via rock star to religious zealot and eventually crooner, with lots of stops along the way.

So I am a fan. I own most of his albums and a few bootlegs on vinyl, even the turds and the religious ones. I also have a dozen Dylan books on my shelves, although not the one that A Complete Unknown was based on, Elija Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! I certainly will not buy all the pricey box sets with endless outtakes, alternative versions and oddities. But I must say I was very glad that I finally saw him live, last year in an auditorium in Wantagh, New York. It was better than I expected, his voice wasn’t totally shot and he entertained us with a curious mix of the well-known and obscure.

Anyway, back to the movie. The reason why I didn’t like it (when we left the cinema I rated it 6,5 out of 10, while my two fellow watchers gave it 7 and 9. The next day I lowered it to 5,5) is that it’s very, very shallow. It’s a film made for nostalgic older men (Dylan fans are very often male) who want to sing along to those tunes that defined the times of optimism and resilience. But it’s also meant for the younger generations, the Millennials and Gen Z, for whom the name Bob Dylan signifies some ancient guy with a horrible voice that their parents and grandparents for some reason still listen to and rave about. They don’t “get" it that “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Like A Rolling Stone” are brilliant, epoch-defining songs.

For those two groups, let’s say over 60 and under 30, it’s a fine film. Timothée Chalamet does a good job of singing, playing and mumbling his way through a couple of dozen Dylan songs, and he conducts conversations in such a Dylanesque fashion that some of the time you can’t hear a thing he’s saying. He’s also pretty good at the sarcastic put-downs that were Dylan’s speciality. The other actors do a fine job of portraying Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Sylvie Rosso (who is based on Suze Rotolo, who died in 2011 and is the young woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from 1963, walking arm in arm through Jones Street in New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village. Dylan didn’t want her real name in the movie because she “was not enough of a public person". It may also have to do with the fact that he didn’t treat her very nicely. Which does come across in the film). 

Endless music video clips

Two major things bug me. First, after a promising beginning, in which we see Dylan arrive in New York City with a guitar and not much else, the film develops into what seems like an endless series of music video clips, with some dialogue in between. We get snippets of songs, in order to whet the appetite of that generation with the short attention span, which gets their music mainly from streaming services.

Grab your phone and click so you can listen to all these gems that you didn’t know existed, is the subliminal message, which has a lot to do with pushing Dylan’s back catalogue, which he sold in 2020 to Universal Music Publishing Group, allegedly for over $300 million. The endless song clips (the film features no fewer than 37 songs) get tiring and make sure the narrative is pushed aside and characters come and go without us having any idea who they are and how they fit in (Bobby Neuwirth, who suddenly appears and instantly becomes Dylan’s bestie is a prime example). 

But the thing absolutely missing from the movie is the reason why Dylan went electric, which is strange because that is the main theme. All we hear is a punchy Kinks song (“All Day And All Of The Night”) in the background and someone asking Dylan if that’s the kind of music he now wants to play. He affirms. But it wasn’t The Kinks who convinced him to switch from acoustic folk to electric rock, it was British band The Animals who had a huge hit in 1964 with their menacing electric cover of “House Of The Rising Sun”, much superior to Dylan’s attempt on his eponymous debut album from 1962. “It rocks," he admitted.

But more than The Animals it was The Beatles who pushed him to go the AC/DC route. According to Dylan, Visions, Portraits And Back Pages (DK, 2005) the epiphany took place in 1964 when Dylan was being driven through rural Colorado, listening to a local radio station. He was “stunned to hear that eight songs in their Top 10 were by The Beatles". He later said: “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous. You could only do that with other musicians. That was obvious. And it started me thinking about other people. But I kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were four teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. In my head The Beatles were it. It seemed to me a definite line had been drawn."

The record that did the trick was “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, which came out on 26 December 1963 and reached the top of the American charts on 18 January 1964, the first Beatles tune to do so. As Beatles expert Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution In The Head (Vintage, 2008): “‘I Want To Hold Your Hand' electrified American pop." It altered everything, it ushered in a new era. “Bob Dylan, too, was able to see past the song’s naivety to the epoch-making spirit animating it," writes MacDonald.

Dylan and The Beatles would develop a creatively healthy competition. Lennon in particular wanted to impress Dylan and wrote highly personal songs such as “Norwegian Wood” and “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”, borrowing from Dylan’s principle that you didn’t have to separate your professional work from your inner life. Dylan got on well with George Harrison and John Lennon whose acerbic wit he liked. He despised some of the hits that were accredited to Paul McCartney, “Yesterday” and “Michelle” in particular, which he dismissed as soft-pop.

After his first concert tour in England in 1965 he also changed his attire. The folky outfits, the sheepskin jacket, the baggy jeans, the workman’s boots and the cap made way for a black jacket, tight black pants, pointy Chelsea boots and dark sunglasses that gave the impression that he was constantly on drugs. He probably was. It was, after all, Dylan who introduced The Beatles to marijuana when they first met in New York in August 1964. The Beatles, who had grown up on a Hamburg diet of alcohol and speed admitted they had never tried weed, which Dylan found amazing. 

Translating chemicals into songs 

Drugs would play an increasing part in the songwriting of The Beatles. Lennon in particular translated his chemical experiences into songs. But that was later. When Dylan first heard The Beatles he heard a band that had taken American rock 'n’ roll and rhythm & blues from the 1950s and had made it their own, young and exciting. Dylan (and tons of other young American musicians, from The Byrds to Bruce Springsteen) knew this was the future and not stuffy folk.

“America should put statues up to The Beatles. They helped give this country’s pride back to it," he said and plugged in a solid body Fender Stratocaster. He took the energetic sound of Liverpool and translated it into the four idiosyncratic electric songs that made up the first side of his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, a title that referenced what had just happened: bringing the English version of American music back to the US and using that. The recording began on January 12, 1965, a mere two weeks after the American release of “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. 

The album hit the shops two months later. It featured a number of session musicians, including John Hammond Jr. and Bruce Langhorne on guitar, drummer Bobby Gregg and bassist Bill Lee, the father of filmmaker Spike Lee. It kicks off in true snotty fashion with “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. Eighteen bars long, it’s a driving blues rocker, inspired by Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”, while the title is a nod to Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans. When vocals come in after an eight-second intro, we hear a new Bob Dylan, the sneering punk rocker. He starts his proto rap with a line about Johnny in the basement who’s mixing up the medicine (most likely codeine), while he is on the pavement thinking about the government (the year is 1964, only a few months after the assassination of president John F. Kennedy). Two lines, a short story. 

A mix of anger and disdain

But there’s more. He fires images at us in a relentless fashion. He spews out the words with a mix of anger and disdain. There are lines about phone-tapping, drug deals, and little throwaways like “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters." Some of the words made such a huge impression on the young and angry that a new ultraradical organisation called itself the Weather Underground, after the line “you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows".

From that moment on, it’s absolutely clear that Bob Dylan has left his somewhat goofy, Chaplinesque image behind and is going full-on rock star. Out go the “finger-pointing songs", the folk tunes with trendy messages like “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Masters Of War”. In comes the surrealist imagery, the visions, the dreams, the paranoia. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” also gave us the first real pop video, with Dylan filmed in black and white in an alley in London, flipping cue cards with words and phrases from the lyrics, throwing them carelessly on the street. Some are intentionally misspelt, like “sucksess".

A predictable mess

Four months after the release of Bringing It All Back Home, on July 25, he would give the assembled folkies at the Newport Folk Festival a taste of his new direction, using the Butterfield Blues Band, who also happened to be playing there, as his impromptu backing band. They had had one day to practice. And it was a predictable mess. The sound was bad, the band didn’t have a clue how to play Dylan’s songs, which had an unusual structure that didn’t conform to the usual 12-bar blues format. “They didn’t really understand what was going on at all. And Bob refused to do much of a rehearsal," his road manager, Jonathan Taplin, told Mojo magazine. 

Anyway, that’s where the film picks up the thread again. In Newport, Dylan and his band played three songs, including “Like A Rolling Stone” which had just been released as a single. The gig lasted a total of 15 minutes, and left the crowd and the organisers angry and aghast. There were boos. But was that really because Dylan had gone electric? It may very well have been the crap sound, or the fact that they only played for 15 minutes while everyone was expecting a 45-minute gig. It was probably a mix of all three, a general disappointment, a sad goodbye to the folk roots and community that had embraced him, fed him and loved him. Bob did come back and played a few acoustic tunes, pointedly ending with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

Turning pop on its head

Those who were there said these 15 minutes turned pop music on its head, and things would never ever be the same again, that it was the end of an era and the beginning of another. And Dylan? Apparently he was utterly exhausted after all the turmoil, sitting in a corner, by himself. But pretty soon he was Bob Dylan again, Bob the rock star in the making, remembered guitarist Mike Bloomfield. “The next night, he was at this party, and he’s sitting next to this girl and her husband, and he’s getting his hand right up her pussy and she’s letting him do this, and her husband’s going crazy ... So Dylan seemed quite untouched by it the next day."

Now that would’ve made a good final scene for A Complete Unknown. 

And for the uninitiated: After the self-titled debut album, the next six official albums, up to and including Blonde On Blonde, are unrivalled in their musical and lyrical depth. Go out, buy them!

♦ VWB ♦

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