I Saw the Bob Dylan Movie, and Surprisingly, It Wasn’t All That Bad

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Biopics of contemporary figures are risky. Austin Butler is widely credited with doing an admirable job in the 2022 movie “Elvis,” but he faced one obstacle that was well-nigh insurmountable: virtually everyone on planet earth knows what Elvis Presley looked like, and as Lloyd Bentsen might have told young Butler, “I knew Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are no Elvis Presley.”

Timothée Chalamet has the same problem portraying young Bob Dylan in the new hit movie “A Complete Unknown.” The world is awash with photos, videos, and audio recordings of Bob Dylan. Chalamet has to contend with comparisons to the greatest Bob Dylan impersonator of them all, a certain Mr. Robert A. Zimmerman. Yet surprisingly enough, Chalamet does a credible, creditable job, and the movie moves along briskly in telling a staple tale of Boomer mythology, the Bob Dylan Origin Story.

As is generally the case with films of this kind, there is a certain amount of corner-cutting and fudging of the facts in order to heighten the drama; here is a list of ten inaccuracies in the movie, and there are more where those came from. Yet most of the things that the film gets wrong are minor or done in service of increasing the film’s dramatic impact, and so can be excused easily enough. One major problem with the film, however, is not so much an inaccuracy as a missed opportunity, a chance that the filmmakers had to include a scene of considerable drama that actually fit in with much of what they did portray.

The movie shows young Dylan arriving in New York City and making a name for himself in the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early 1960s. Everyone involved is on the far left; Dylan ventures to a New Jersey hospital to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie, and there (at least in the movie) encounters another folk singer, Pete Seeger.

Both Guthrie and Seeger (superbly portrayed by Edward Norton) were hardcore leftist ideologues. So was Dylan’s love interest Joan Baez (here somewhat disappointingly played by Monica Barbaro, who is fine but conspicuously lacks Ms. Baez’s beauty, voice, and charisma) and another Dylan girlfriend, Suze Rutolo, who walks through the Village arm-in-arm with him on the cover of his 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and is here transmogrified into “Sylvie Russo.”

“A Complete Unknown” shows Dylan slipping easily into this milieu, effortlessly writing protest songs that win the awe and respect of his peers and rivals, as well as the adulation of folk music fans. The movie then follows Dylan’s determination to start using electric instruments and striving for a sound that was more rock and roll than conventional folk music. He is portrayed as a hero of artistic integrity, steadfastly pursuing his artistic vision even over the furious opposition of Seeger and other folk purists, and the jeers and catcalls of the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival.

That’s all fine, but the missed opportunity comes in the way the movie treats the political realm. “A Complete Unknown” is extremely aware of the politics of the day, reminding us in due course of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the struggle against segregation, and more. We get glimpses of Dylan singing some of his protest songs, and appearing (as he did in real life) at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a massive civil rights event that drew over 250,000 people.

Also in real life, however, Dylan drew back from being simply a singer of protest songs, as Baez and others intensely wanted him to be. In 1964, he even wrote a song, “My Back Pages,” that deals obliquely with his desire to leave the realm of writing songs about politics, and contains a memorable rebuke of the earnest folkies who took themselves so very seriously and thought their leftist ditties could and would change the world: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Dylan’s decision to stop writing songs about political events and causes, and to venture into much more abstract and oblique songwriting, went right along with his famous decision to go electric. Yet while the latter is lavishly dramatized in “A Complete Unknown,” Dylan’s retreat from political songwriting is not mentioned at all. We don’t get any scene of Dylan playing “My Back Pages” before a crowd of outraged leftist folkies — and to be sure, such a scene would have been as imaginary as other parts of the movie, as Dylan didn’t play the song live until 1978. Still, the omission of any notice at all of Dylan’s retreat from politics is all the stranger in light of the fact that the movie never shies away from the political realm; we even get a lengthy scene in which Seeger courageously stands his ground against a judge who strongly suspects (correctly) that he is a commie, and Dylan is nowhere to be seen.

Could this omission have to do with the fact that Hollywood today is more politicized than ever before, and so when filmmakers are producing movies of this kind about the heroes of their leftist subculture, they don’t dare include anything that doesn’t fit in with the myth they’re trying to create?

That would be particularly ironic in this context, as Bob Dylan has become notorious for refusing to be pinned down or categorized in all manner of ways. This movie, which is fine overall and worth seeing, even celebrates him for that very fact. But there are some lines that woke Hollywood knows not to cross.

Anyway, Chalamet was so believable as Dylan that here’s hoping he becomes the focus of the DCU — you know, the Dylan Cinematic Universe. We could have endless sequels of Dylan the superhero, nobody’s man but his own: Dylan Crashes His Motorcycle (the famous crash is repeatedly alluded to, but not portrayed in “A Complete Unknown”); Dylan Skips Woodstock; Dylan Goes Country; Dylan Becomes a Family Man; Dylan Dons Whiteface and Meets Up with Joan Baez Again; Dylan Becomes a Christian; Dylan Gets Lost in the Eighties; Dylan Becomes a DJ; Dylan Sings Sinatra; on and on. The man could have more sequels than Batman. Come on, Hollywood! He contains multitudes!