Photo: Wikipedia.org – Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the civil rights march on Washington, 1963

We saw the Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown over Christmas. I had mentioned in a conversation on social media that I wasn’t planning to see it because I didn’t trust Hollywood to do justice to Dylan or the times. I would say I turned out to be generally correct.

Not that it was a terrible movie by any means. It was good and I recommend seeing it. In typical Hollywood fashion though, they did really well in certain aspects but seemed to run out of gas or budget or just didn’t bother to get everything right. So it was half of a good movie.

The actor that played Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) was great as you’ve probably heard. He looked and sounded enough like Dylan that you could suspend belief and it didn’t take effort to sustain. He not only sang the songs in the movie himself, he actually performed them live on camera. That part is impressive. It was nice to not have to watch fakey lip syncing.

The thing that bugged me was they didn’t get his hair right. I guess everybody gets a wig now if you’re an actor in the movies, but the Dylan character’s hair was and looked like an obvious wig. Maybe most wouldn’t notice or care but for those of us who actually came of age during those times, that minor detail could break the spell. Plus, there was a close-up of Dylan riding his motorcycle through the streets and his hair wasn’t blowing in the wind. At all.

The Woodie Guthrie character (played by Scoot McNairy) was well cast. That was a touching part of the Bob Dylan story I hadn’t known about.

The Pete Seeger character (Edward Norton) was amazing. He was on the screen a lot, I would say even more than Joan Baez. He was perfectly cast and the film focused on the changing relationship between Seeger and Dylan throughout.

Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) shows up. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it yet.

Full disclosure the film is based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!  by Elijah Wald which I have not read.  It was trying to highlight the story of the folk music genre, Dylan’s importance to it and the inevitable changes that were coming. This necessarily included the traumatic (for the folk music crowd) shift by Dylan away from the traditional songs when he turned toward rock music and from acoustic to electric.

For my money,  the filmmaker missed opportunities to highlight for audiences the true nature of that time of transition, what the folk musicians were hanging onto through the music, why it was important, what was at stake. They believed they could create a better world through the music, that they were on the verge of arriving and that Bob Dylan and his songs could help get them there.  I felt like if they had spent a bit more time on that aspect it would have been a better movie overall.

There was a scene where it looked like they were going to give us a better glimpse into their world but stopped short. Pete Seeger was on his way to jail and stopped outside of the courthouse to answer reporters’ questions. He picked up his guitar and started singing, “This Land is Your Land.” There were a few people standing around and they started to sing along with him. And just as I started to think, this is cool, maybe they will actually do a good thing here, they abruptly cut away from the song after only a few bars of the timeless folk classic that still would carry so much meaning today.

I’m sure they didn’t play a single entire song or close to it, even the songs sung at live events. They were clipped super short. It was frustrating.

My other trouble with the movie was how they handled the Joan Baez character (played by Monica Barbaro). She didn’t have as big a speaking role as I would have thought.  (Barbaro did her own performances and had voice training to sound like Joan Baez, a daunting task).

The movie didn’t tell you much about Joan and Bob’s relationship. The director skipped opportunities to enlighten us about folk music, but they had plenty of time to show Joan Baez making coffee and parading around Dylan’s apartment in her underwear.  Baez was actually much more famous and successful at the time than Dylan and helped him in his career. But I’d say the film glossed over that.

Despite these things, I wouldn’t say don’t go see the film. It was enjoyable. I came away from it feeling lucky to have grown up with the music of those times.

Last but not least, it is a great thing to have Bob Dylan and his music front and center in American pop culture again, sixty years later.

Maybe it will help us somehow.

Here’s to 2025!

For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

– Bob Dylan