January 28, 2025

Re: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, Bob Dylan, and Becoming a Self

On Christmas night, my family and I piled into my wife’s car and made the short drive over to Vestavia Hills, Alabama (yep, that “Vestavia Hills”) to catch the 7:00pm showing of the new Bob Dylan “biopic” A Complete Unknown. Normally, I have to do some arm-twisting to get my teenagers to watch what I want to watch, but this time it was pretty easy. “Dad,” as one of my sons quasi-ironically quipped “Timmy Himtron is in it!” That they wanted to watch A Complete Unknown because of its leading man—the 29-year-old American-French wunderkind and megastar Timothée Chalamet—was a bargain I was willing to take. Perhaps the movie would show them that my longstanding devotion to Bob Dylan was not random but, in fact, well founded. Perhaps they might even become fans too.

The movie ended around 9.30pm, and, before we even got to the parking lot, my kids were already peppering me with questions:

“Did people actually boo Dylan at Newport?”

“Well, sort of. The guy who called Dylan ‘Judas’ was actually at Manchester, in England.”

“Did Dylan actually have that much rizz?”

“By all accounts, yes.”

“Whoa.”

“Not necessarily a good thing,” my wife cautioned.

A couple of days later, my 16-year-old borrowed my car (much to his chagrin, he doesn’t have his own car yet). When he returned it, I learned that he had been listening to Dylan’s 1966 classic Blonde on Blonde—this, after already plowing through The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and Bringing It All Back Home (1965). This is the kind of feedback that the Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer” just can’t capture. A Complete Unknown is the rare movie that can literally change one’s habits and practices.

The movie’s success—on January 23, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards—is owing to a variety of factors. Some have given credit to the source material: director James Mangold cowrote the screenplay with reputable screenwriter Jay Cocks, drawing on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties. Others have noted that A Compete Unknown’s strong box office numbers indicate a cross-demographic appeal, ranging from Baby Boomer “Dylanologists” to Gen Z members of “Club Chalamet” to music lovers of all ages. These opinions are not wrong in and of themselves—to be sure, Chalamet’s authentic and, I daresay, already legendary rendering of Dylan may net him an Oscar in March 2025—but I would take a different approach. In my view, the indispensable condition for the success of A Complete Unknown was the ostensibly simple decision to treat Dylan as a person. The film may mythologize certain aspects of Dylan’s career, but it never treats the man as just a myth.

This is a subtle but significant distinction. In my 2023 book Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence, I open by noting that much of the secondary literature on Dylan suggests that he “is inscrutable—a Janus-faced trickster who changes Weltanschauungen like most people change clothes.” Not coincidentally, this was a thesis promoted by a previous Dylan biopic called I’m Not There (2007). Directed by Todd Haynes, whose previous film Far From Heaven (2002) received four Oscar nominations, I’m Not There was critically acclaimed, not least because it experimented with narrative form. Rather than have a single person play Dylan, Haynes cast six different actors—including a preteen Black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) and a middle-aged woman (the astonishing Cate Blanchett)—to represent different facets of Dylan’s identity. The upshot was a thought-provoking, if also necessarily asymmetrical, cinematic experience:

It must be noted, however, that I’m Not There is not just an aesthetic exercise. As I discussed in Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence, the movie is making a philosophical point too:

According to director Todd Haynes, I’m Not There is an exploration of “a dissolution of meaning, a crisis of meaning” that Dylan represents in his life and in his art. On this reading, Dylan’s adoption of sundry personae—a hardscrabble folk musician here, a sleek pop star there—constitutes a rebellion against the notion of individual identity, which is “a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.” Thus Dylan’s vast corpus of songs, along with his efforts in cinema, literature, and the visual arts, are not in service to a grand design or a higher purpose. Instead, they bear witness to the artist’s “healthy erraticality,” whereby he “transitions from character to character or self to self, which come with a death . . . is also a liberation into a new self, a new identity.”

Haynes’ broadly postmodern anthropology is both reflective of and contributory to much of Dylan scholarship. It has, in other words, appropriated and furthered the belief that nothing definitive can be said about Dylan’s output. And yet, if accepted as true, then this also leaves Dylan fans and scholars alike with a conundrum: does his body of work mean anything? Is it nothing more than a play of ideas and façades?

In his inimitable study Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003), the British literary critic Sir Christopher Ricks—who was nearing his thirtieth birthday when Dylan first arrived in New York City in January 1961—suggests a different approach. Citing the example of his esteemed predecessor Sir William Empson (1906-84), Ricks argues that the “critic’s enterprise” is to “give grounds for the faith that is in him.” What this entails, for both Empson and Ricks, is trying to find “the right handle to take hold of the bundle.” That is to say, it entails the attempt to determine an organizing principle by which one can grasp the totality of an author’s work. With an artist as capacious and complex as Dylan, this is no easy task, but it is not impossible. According to Ricks, Dylan’s depiction of and response to the problem of sin “is for me the right handle to take hold of the bundle.” It’s not just that “the word ‘sin’ haunts [Dylan’s] songs,” though it certainly does. It’s also that Dylan himself has acknowledged that good songs have to be about something. As Dylan once put it, “I have [things] to say about such things as…salvation and sin.” Moreover, as if to underline this aesthetic precept, Dylan’s collection of liner notes to World Gone Wrong—his (excellent) 1993 album of traditional folk songs—begins with a simple heading: “ABOUT THE SONGS (what they’re about).” In short, treating Dylan as a diffuse, impenetrable poet is not worthy of the critic’s enterprise, just as Dylan himself, acting as critic, has likewise refused to evaluate the folk tradition as a “dissolution of meaning.”

In Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence, I expressed general sympathy for Ricks’ point of view, noting that Dylan’s Visions of Sin boldly dares to provide a broad interpretive orientation where other books have settled for a mere aspect or slice of Dylan’s oeuvre. I also likened this challenge to the one faced by scholars of Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), who, as is well known, couched many of his best philosophical and theological ideas in writings ascribed to pseudonyms. Did Kierkegaard not mean what he was saying? Is there even a “he” behind the Dane’s diverse array of works? These are complex problems on which Kierkegaard, in contrast to Dylan, spilled more than a little ink in working out. But could we then use Kierkegaard’s insights to amplify and to sharpen Ricks’ critical intuition—that there really is a “right handle to take hold of the bundle” when confronting Dylan’s work? My project answers in the affirmative.

Whether or not I’m successful in this endeavor is, of course, for the reader to decide. But I will say this: I have never enjoyed writing a book more than Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence, and I’m confident that the similarities between Kierkegaard and Dylan are credible and important. Moreover, after watching A Complete Unknown and seeing how the film has sparked a wave of interest in Dylan’s life and songwriting, I’m further convinced that Dylan’s legacy is best served by focusing more on what brings his artistic career together than on what splinters it apart. We might say, then, that Mangold’s approach trumps that of Haynes, however clever and provocative the latter’s may be. For Mangold, in a nutshell, offers the viewer a handle with which to take hold of the bundle.

To be sure, in A Complete Unknown, there’s only one Dylan, played by only one actor (Chalamet), who meticulously studied Dylan’s mannerisms and speech patterns in order to reproduce the man. In a recent interview, Chalamet explicitly states that “singing like Dylan, talking like Dylan” was the daunting, yet exhilarating, objective of taking the role in the first place: “It was really a process of osmosis. … This is a movie about folk music and folk musicians. The authenticity needs to be felt.” In the clip below, Chalamet’s Dylan is still fairly new to the Greenwich Village folk scene, though he has already caught the eye of both fellow musicians and industry executives. One such person is Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, in an excellent performance), who is already a known commodity on the local circuit. The two would go on to have a famously stormy relationship, but, crucially, Dylan also presents a different vision for the future of popular music. Baez treats traditional folk standards with staid reverence. For her, the songs can’t be bettered, only adorned. As Dylan, with acerbic geniality, quips to a live audience: “How about that Joan Baez, folks? She’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty.” By way of contrast, Dylan is already writing his own songs, which have roots in the American folk tradition but are not subservient to it:

What Chalamet does here is deeper than “acting.” He almost conjures up the steely genius of the young Dylan—a point that Dylan himself has recently suggested on Twitter/X:

“Believable as me”: this is a curious phrase. On the one hand, it makes a straightforward point—that Dylan’s “me” is there after all, that part of Chalamet’s brilliance lies in “believably” reproducing Dylan’s true self. Yet, if we drill down deeper into these claims, a train of questions emerges: What exactly is a self? And what is the process by which an actor manifests the self of another? Can one person’s outward inflections and mannerisms actually reveal something about someone else’s inner life?

Though I didn’t address these questions in Bob Dylan and the Spheres of Existence—the book, after all, is about songwriting, not acting—it is remarkable (and convenient!) that Kierkegaard was a great fan of the theater. In fact, in 1848, he wrote a series of pieces about the thespian arts. The one that is most relevant to A Complete Unknown is “Mr. Phister as Scipio” (“Hr. Phister as Captain Scipio”), a pseudonymous, posthumously published piece written in honor of the great Danish actor Joachim Ludvig Phister (1807-96). For several years, Phister had garnered accolades for his portrayal of Captain Scipio in the opéra comique Ludovic, which premiered in Paris in May 1833 and became a theatrical staple in Copenhagen later in the decade. Ludovic was last performed during Kierkegaard’s lifetime in June 1846.

In “Mr. Phister as Scipio,” Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Procul praises Phister for understanding the contradictions inherent in Scipio’s character. He is at once a dignified military man and an alcoholic. The trick, as it were, is to manifest the tension between the two at the same time; it is to let the outer simultaneously reveal and hide the inner. Yet, if this is true, then Scipio does not have multiple selves, only a single self that is dialectically situated between existential poles, hoping yet struggling to find spiritual balance and tranquility. This is precisely what Phister, in preparing for his role, took to heart. He is a reflective, diligent actor, whose “diligence…is: study, thoughtfulness, reflection’s care for every detail.” Hence, in his attention to the nuances of personality, Phister has brought Scipio’s existential “contradiction” to the fore.

Something similar could be said of Chalamet’s rendering of Dylan. He does not offer the viewer multiple Dylans, only one who is caught between the polarities of selfhood—the desires of finitude (sex) and those of infinitude (the ethico-religious ideals about which he writes); the requirements of necessity (making a living) and the yearnings of possibility (breaking free of the folk scene and becoming an artist in his own right). Indeed, the plot of A Complete Unknown unfolds exactly along these lines. The movie has been criticized for certain historical inaccuracies, but this is to miss the larger point. Human beings are not just material creatures but also spiritual ones, and A Complete Unknown is as much about the development of Dylan’s consciousness as it is about the release of such-and-such album or the tracklist at such-and-such concert. When the movie begins, Dylan arrives in New York City as an obscure new artist, “a complete unknown,” just a kid from Minnesota looking to “catch a spark.” When it ends, he’s riding his motorcycle, heading into a future that is equally indeterminate, even dangerous.

But this does not mean that Dylan has failed to make progress. He’s uncoupled himself from the political prerequisites of the folk movement, even as he’s embarked on a new, if tumultuous, career as a superstar musician — indeed, as Bob Dylan. The road ahead will not get easier anytime soon, but at least he’s on the way. As Dylan puts it on “Dirt Road Blues,” the second track on Time Out of Mind (1997): “Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed / ’Til there’s nothing left to see, ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed.”

So, if you haven’t already, go see A Complete Unknown. I don’t think it’s a masterpiece of world cinema on par with Citizen Kane (1941) or Andrei Rublev (1966). But it’s very good film, skillfully directed and beautifully acted, that shows the young Bob Dylan struggling with what everyone must ultimately struggle with: becoming a self on the long and winding road to one’s eternal destiny.