Dylan destroyed one world, started another

"A Complete Unknown" brings the songs - and Bob - back to us.

If, like me, you’ve spent the better part of your adult life following the career of Bob Dylan, you’ve already imagined the story. Minnesota kid drops out of college, hitchhikes all the way to New York City with a guitar and twenty bucks in his pocket, fueled on cigarettes and dreams, nudged his way onto smoke-filled stages in Greenwich Village and tired of recycling all these folk classics — which he learned backwards and forwards before he had the nerve to write a word of his own — starts writing his own material, a profusion, an absolute spring-water clear river of words that seemingly cannot be stopped.

Somehow, he and his words find a way forward; evolving a persona, discovering a new path, his songs cleaving the air unlike anyone else’s, something that amazes both him and the insular folk world around him. Soon, he has no choice but to leave it, to follow his muse, a siren song only he can hear.

"A Complete Unknown" what a Christmas gift to all of us.

If you know and have listened to every cut in the enduring catalog of Bob Dylan, you know all this. It’s a whole other thing to see it unfold on the silver screen, a film that beautifully captures the early life of Bob Dylan but also, for many of us, our lives, too. We aren’t in the credits but we are there, too.

“A Complete Unknown,” the brand new, much-hyped film by James Mangold and starring Timothee Chalamet as our hero, peels back your aural memory, the striking, distinctively different combination of voice and language that cut through the drama and chaos of the 60’s so dramatically that you had to listen. And he insisted on being heard. And, as “Unknown’s” exquisitely chosen selection of songs reveals, once he started singing, everybody shut up and listened. How different the experience of his concerts were from those of The Beatles, where fans screamed so loud, they made it impossible for Ringo to tell where they were in the song; he had to watch John Lennon’s ass.

Dylan’s concerts early on were almost recitals; absolute silence, hanging on his every word as if — and for some it was — Scripture. And Dylan just kept churning, exploring, writing songs that often were literary daredevil runs, he stared into the fire of creativity and didn’t flinch, he was fearless.

Even at the arguable peak of his art, which perhaps began to crest at Newport in 1965, the climactic moment in “Unknown,” captured beautifully, leaving some/many/half of his folk fans behind, he trusted what he was doing, what he thought, no matter who he stepped on or disappointed or left wondering what the hell happened.

“Unknown’s” carefully chosen soundtrack of songs and images to go with them were perfect; Bob singing his first published tune, “Song To Woody” to a failing Woody Guthrie in a hospital bed, working out “Girl From The North Country” in Pete Seeger’s cabin, who had generously put the hitchhiker up for a few nights, Bob plucking "Masters Of War” out of the air in a nuclear-war-threatened world, those songs, which built on revelation after revelation when they first came to life, the sequence all makes sense to us now. “Unknown” helps us walk in his footsteps, follow his path.

Edward Norton is marvelous as Pete Seeger, the unofficial conscience of folk music. Woody Guthrie passed the torch to Pete and he was ready and eager, even, to pass it to Bob. But our hero had to move on, leaving lovers, followers, record company execs in his wake. One of those, wonderfully played by Monica Barbaro, was Joan Baez.

There are those who saw Dylan’s rise as pure ruthless ambition, a unstoppable, undeniable, determination to triumph over his competition. Chalamet’s performance, as I saw it, was subtler than that. He genuinely seemed to inhabit the role of a young man unleashing his talent, with no guardrails, no precedents, in an America, as Dylan once wrote about the young Elvis, who “walks the path between heaven and nature in an America that was wide open, when anything was possible.”

That America was still there in 1961 when a skinny Minnesota kid hitchhiked those 1,340 miles from Hibbing to stools on stage in the Cafe Wha? or Gerde’s Folk City or The Bitter End, unspooling a string of original songs that, in many ways, destroyed one world and began another.

There has been so much written about this extraordinary film already — I made it a point to not read any of them before I saw the film for myself — it may not be possible to shine a light somewhere new, offer a thought as fresh and dynamic and irresistible as what a young Bob Dylan unleashed on the world with no warning. Well, there was “The Times They Are A-Changin’”

If you’ve spent as much time with Bob as I have — and many of you may have spent even more — hearing those songs once again presented in a respectful, authentic visual context (And who cares if Bob ever actually did play “Song To Woody” TO Woody) can only touch your heart once again, like they did the first time you heard them.

This film tells a story we already know, most of us. But a story that, like all great dreams in America, bears retelling, repeating and maybe, reliving.

“A Complete Unknown,” of course, is an ironic title. Anybody who doesn’t know about Nobel Laureate Dylan by this point has missed one of our great American tales. But for the price of a movie ticket, you can sit in a darkened theater, let those songs wash over you again, almost like the very first time. And delight that we still have every one of them — and him — all these years later. Any time we want to.

What a gift. On Christmas Day, too! Thanks, Bob. Again.

John Nogowski is the author of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography 1961-2022” available locally at Barnes & Noble and Midtown Reader, online at Amazon.