One snowy night this week the movies came calling. Erica and I went to the Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” and took that emotional rock ‘n’ roll motorcycle ride back to Newport, R.I., 1965. The movie grabbed us from the get-go. At that moment in the life of America everything seemed unstable. Young people my age were looking over our shoulders at the draft board as the war in Vietnam escalated. The fight for civil rights and the cultural rebellion were about to boil over.
Pacesetters like Bob Dylan had what he apparently hated, stardom, an almost reverence. At the time of the events pictured in the film, young people didn’t have a lot to rely on. Dylan was a constant, the Pied Piper of folk.
Then that summer day in Newport, R.I., he changed everything. The one and only Bob Dylan put aside his acoustic guitar and played a three-song set on an electric guitar, backed by a rock band.
It does not sound like much to subsequent generations, but for me and my age cohort in 1965, Dylan plugging in his guitar was huge news, the end of the folksong era. To some it was a betrayal.
He was the singer/writer of our anthems. “Blowin’ in the Wind” 1962, if you’re over 50, you’ve sung it. “How many roads must a man walk down/before you call him a man?” etc.
It wasn’t just the fear that folk music was ending that fueled the disquiet over Dylan leaving folk for rock ‘n roll. He was our saint, the voice of our generation. The movie reminds us that in August 1963 he played that acoustic guitar to the crowd of 250,000 at Washington, DC’s epic March for Jobs and Freedom where he sang, “Only a Pawn in their Game,” which he wrote about the assassination of civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers just three months before.
Overshadowed that day on the Washington Mall only by the great Martin Luther King Jr. delivering probably the greatest speech ever, Dylan is also an American giant. He is the one movie star/famous person that I have not met that I still want to. I’ve been a fan since 1963. In 1967, I copied Dylan’s ride from NY to Newport on my old Ducati to see among other greats Judy Collins and Joan Baez playing at that year’s festival 58 years ago.
This current movie about Dylan, “A Complete Unknown,” is flawless, so are the players. Monica Barbaro is wonderful as Joan Baez. Confident and vulnerable, she should get an Academy Award. So should Timothée Chalamet. He is great as Dylan during that magical period, writing lyrics of what ailed us —war, racism, poverty—but as the portrayal makes clear, he could still be narcissistic, jerky and self-serving. Chalamet sings his Dylan songs like he totally understands the message Bob wants to send.
As the credits remind us, in 2016 Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the only songwriter ever to be so honored. These days, it’s hip-hop or Country/Western where the sad songs have gone. I’m old school. I got teary eyed twice watching this movie and had to be shushed twice by Erica for unconsciously singing out loud. That’s what old men do, cry and sing out loud.
