Bob Dylan's A Complete Unknown Revolution

 Last Christmas we all got the gift of reliving musical history by way of the Bob Dylan biopic, "A Complete Unknown". Thanks to my Dad's teachings when I was a little girl, I grew up knowing who Bob Dylan is and am of course familiar with his big hits , "Like a Rolling Stone", "The Times They Are A - Changing" and even more obscure ones like "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" but I don't really know much about the man or his music. I know he's Jacob Dylan's dad, lead singer of The Wallflowers. I've always known he's a big deal; I mean he is Bob Dylan after all. I knew that he has a unique voice and somewhere in my memory banks is a distant recolection of hearing something along the lines of him not being the most friendly guy. 

Honestly I didn't have a desire to see the film leading up to its release. I'm not necessarily a fan of Timothee Chalamet and less of a fan of the fact he's currently dating a Kardashian sister. After hearing that my Dad wanted to see it and then that my boss, who used to tour the world with her bands, saw it and thought it was good, I decided I might as well see it while it was still in theaters. If there was a time to learn about Bob Dylan, it was now. 

And what better place to see it than the single screen movie theater, The Art Theatre in Long Beach. Out of the handful of people who were at the same Sunday evening screening of the now Golden Globe nominated film, I was one of if not the youngest person there.
Two and a half hours later I was awestruck. The acting is great on all accounts: Norton, Fanning, Barbaro. Though it took me a little while to totally suspend my disbelief, after a while I sort of forgot that I was watching Timothee Chalamet. I was watching the story of Bob Dylan. As Dylan got a little older in the movie, his hair a little more poofy, then I was really able to suspend my disbelief. 

Heading into the movie, I thought about what genre of music Bob Dylan fits into based on what I did know. I knew he was a little bit country, he liked the harmonica and he was also a little bit rock N roll. And again, I knew he was, he is, a big deal in the music world. 

Not that there wasn't dialogue throughout the movie, because there was, but Bob didn't say very much. We didn't really get to know him and after a while you come to understand that's how he wanted it. Bob Dylan is a mysterious character. The most anyone got to know him was through his music. If a movie can be carried by the acting skills of it's cast with little dialogue or main characters with fewer lines than others it usually makes for a good movie.  Bob Dylan's style, story and approach played right into that. When he did talk, Chalamet's portrayal of Dylan, from what I know, was pretty spot on. Monotone, mumbly and gravely with ahint of an undisclosed  drawl when he spoke translated to his earnestly sang songs all of which Chamelet took on himself. Every song heard in "A Complete Unknown" was sung by the actors.

Elle Fannings character, Suze, has a couple of key non-dialogued scenes bookended in the movie. Both have to do with not wanting to trust her gut instinct of betrayal, however being moved to tears makes it hard to ignore. It's powerfully moving when the viewer knows exactly what a character in a movie is thinking and feeling with no words spoken. When you can feel the emotions through acting sans words, that's good acting.

I wish we would have gotten more of an understanding of Edward Norton's character, how he fit into Dylan's story and budding career.  What we got was good and the dynamic between the two elevated the experience of watching them on screen together. Same goes for the character of Woody. The costumes and cinematography took you back in time to the 1960's without a second thought about it. 

The Art Theater in Long Beach
photo by Nikki DeMartini

Starting as a folk musician who wound up being signed by one of the biggest record labels of the time, then CBS Records, now Columbia Records, Dylan, so it seems, has always beat to his own drum. He wrote songs about what was going on around him, personally and interpersonally, as musicians do but he didn't try to play it safe. Feelings and thoughts about what was happening in the world around him: the repercussions of the Vietnam war here at home saw a divided United States on the brink of further civil division as Americans fought for equality for all. The uprising protests of the people against the United States government and its policies could be seen in a wide variety of artistic faucets, including music. When Bob Dylan released "1964's "Times They Are A Changing", "Another Side Of Bob Dylan" and 1965's "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway  61 Revisited" he wasn't only breaking out of the folk music mold where people had learned to love him, he was bending and blending genres. He was starting a musical revolution during a revolutionary time in America. One might say that Bob Dylan's music in the mid 1960's fueled the revolution, the protests, the changes. Bob Dylan may have very well played a hand in getting Americans to mobilize and make change. That's the power music has. It brings people together on a common ground of understanding. Did the movie inaccurately depict this movement stemming from one album debuted at a Folk Music Festival? Yes, it did. It is a movie after all. It also gets the point across much like how a loud, angry mob of protestors has the power to get people's attention, get people to actually listen and pay attention to what's going on. 

A Complete Unknown poster at The Art Theater in Long Beach
photo by Nikki DeMartini

The last scene of the movie gave me chills which  multiplied as the credits ran and more facts about Dylan were shared. One of those facts being that he's a Nobel Prize in Literature winner for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. Bob Dylan didn't let the label he was on control the type of music he'd create whether it be folk, country, blues, rock n roll, acoustic or plugged in, Dylan wrote about what he wanted to write about, sang what he wanted to sing about and played the music that he wanted to play how he wanted to play it. Singing about the world as he saw it, obectively, with very little emotional interference, paved the way for so many others to do the same only in their own way from their own perspective. 

 

I can't remember the last movie I recommended but I started recommending this one to friends almost immediately. One friend said she'd been getting lots of people recommending it to her and that they had been on a Bob Dylan listening kick ever since seeing it. I too was guilty of this as I listened to Bob Dylan for days after seeing "A Complete Unknown" with "Like a Rolling Stone" on heavy rotation and in most cases, with me singing along.

 

In the political atmosphere that America faced then and are currently facing now, his lyrics still have the power of delivering a sense of comfort in the possibly of hope. Maybe, somehow, some good will come out of an administration that's hell-bent on stripping rights away from people. An administration set to diabolically widen the gap between the rich and the not rich.

 An administration of oppression and suppression aimed at keeping the American people dumbed down and barely surviving. Keeping them too worn down to fight or even empower themselves. 
As a woman in this country, a country that re-elected a known rapist, racist, reality TV star billionaire who had Americans attempt to throw over the government because he's a sore loser, I sure do hope that changes are a coming. Change is good but it is hard and to get people to listen, you have to be loud and you can't back down.
In essence, that's what Bob Dylan did and look at him now. 

Since my Dad planned on seeing the movie himself, I got the idea of doing a joint dad and daughter, movie review: someone who doesn't know very much about Bob Dylan and someone who does.

Below is my Dad's take on "A Complete Unknown":

Being born in 1963, my life began almost simultaneously to Bob Dylan's influence on American Culture. The times were heady. Politically John F. Kennedy was delaing with crises in Cuba and Vietnam - and musically, Beatlemania was sweeping the UK and beyond. Bob Dylan's first album, released a year prior, did not establish the artist in any sense of notoriety. But, his 1963 release, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, served as a catapult - Bob Dylan had arrived. 

The new film by James Mangold, "A Complete Unknown" attempts to tell the story of the celebrated and complicated singer/songwriter's musical comeuppance and generally succeeds in its depictions. 

I am no Dylan aficionado, so I did not recognize many of the filmmakers' innaccuracies surrounding some intricate details of the story. 

Personally, I was intrigued by the insertion, visual and otherwise, of some other folk music artists of the time - Mary Travers, Odetta & Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee - but longed for others like Ramblin' Jack Elliot and John Lee Hooker. Each actor seemed to capture the essence of their character - emotionally, physically and personally. The fact that each of them performed the music and mimicked the likes of Dylan, Joan Baez,  Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash is remarkable. 

Timothee Chalamet portrays the Dylan mystique flawlessly and Ed Norton nails his role as Pete Seeger - the beleaguered musical mentor. Watching the interactions of the two on-screen harkened the idea of Dylan as Seegers' own Tyler Durden - a bold and mysterious alter ego the Seegers struggled to contain. 

The film is not flawless and includes many Hollywood biopic tropes - but it is an acting tour de force. "A Complete Unkown" also achieves another grand accomplishment - it sparks a new generation of interest in the legend, and more importantly, the music of Bob Dylan. And that is a very good thing. 
- review written by Curtis DeMartini

The times are indeed changing.
A mere four days into Trump's second term as the President of the United States of America and we're  witnessing: 
 the largest deportation operation in United States history
 the name change of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America
intolerance of the transexual community
threats of funds being withheld from a devastating natural disaster in a "blue" state
blatant anti-semitism on display for the world to see at the Presidential inauguration 
already high grocery prices on the rise
social media controlled by the government
insurgents being pardoned
Snoop Dogg supporting red

This is only the beginning. 

I for one am eager to see what new music comes out over the next four years and the changes that it can spark. The future doesn't look so bright right now. While these obstacles we're faced to overcome and not succumb to are big and scary and daunting, we can't let that stop us. To quote the great American President Franklin D. Roosevelt " the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". We the people cannot let fear stop us. They want us to be afraid. Afraid and poor, hopeless and powerless.
We can overcome.
It will not be easy, but it has been done before.
We have done it before.

No one is saving us from us USA, it is time to face the music.