The Bob Dylan Movie (Was Dylan The First Punk?)

A Complete Unknown

Photo by Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash

When my best friend in high school and I—also named “Mike,” which everyone called me back then; kids at school called us “Mike Squared”—were in my room one night, illicitly drinking surreptitious forties of Old English (purchased by local Ojai bums who we gave a few bucks extra to so they could get their own), my mother knocked on the door with a surprise.

This was circa the year 2000. We were sixteen. I’d met Mike earlier that year and he and his best friend—one grade above us—took a liking to the thin, golden-haired, innocent, awkward wannabe punk kid. Since then, for the past half year, I’d been constantly going to punk shows, spiking my hair up like an electrified troll doll, rebelling openly and brazenly against my parents, even getting arrested.

For the first time in my life I didn’t give a shit about anything. I was pissed off, young, fearless, privileged and drunk. Punk rock was my savior.

Mike and Dono—the two guys who pulled me into the punk scene in Ojai/Ventura/Oxnard—had been dressing the part and doing the deal since roughly sixth grade. They were serious about it. They came from dysfunctional, divorced families with less money than mine; scholarship kids. Kids from the “wrong side of the tracks,” my mom said.

And of course I loved it. Read the autobiographical novel I published all about it HERE.

Mike had told me once that there were precursors to punk; proto-punkers, if you like. The Doors. Iggy Pop. The New York Dolls. The Dictators. The Screamers. MC-5. Dono even explained to me once that the first true punk was Johnny Cash: He’d been a rebel, wore all black, bucked the system, embraced chaos and anarchy, followed his own trail.

I’d been on the outs with my mom for a while by this point—we’d been locked in heathen, sordid battle—so generally when she knocked I was irritated. Especially because often she knocked and then immediately opened the door, asserting whatever thread of authority she felt she still possessed at that point by saying in effect, I can come in whenever I want; I don’t need your permission; you’re still a child and I’m the adult, your goddamn mother.

But this night was different.

Upon opening the door—we instantly hid our forties behind my open accordion closet—she looked at us from across the room, smiled and said, all-too-randomly, Do you want my old records?

I’d seen mildewed boxes containing her old, warped records in the garage and utility room on many occasions. I’d never particularly cared. My mom’s 1960s records were probably terrible, I figured. But this time I looked at Mike and he smiled with his eyes and, non-verbally, it was a go.

I walked out my door and down the long, narrow hallway along uneven cobbled brick, across the pool-table-chalk-blue furry carpet, down the dozen carpeted stairs, out the door, past the iron gate, down into the musty, humid, mildewy utility room in the little separate region unconnected, technically, to the house.

I found a random cardboard box and, taking in the sharp old cheese-mildew stink of the ancient box and warped albums, I carried it back the way I’d come.

Inside my room, after my mom briefly lectured us on her music choices from back in her time—boring—we closed my door, swigged our forties, and ran our fingers greedily along the albums.

There was a lot of crap: Christmas albums, Linda Ronstadt, far too much Barbara Streisand, etc.

But.

We also found Bob Dylan. Specifically, a warped copy of Highway 61 Revisited. I’d heard of Dylan at that point—my God who hadn’t?—but I’d never listened to him, at least not intentionally in any meaningful way. I’d always just thought, Blah blah blah, singer-songwriter from my mom’s generation. Boomer stuff.

But we loved the cover, Dylan with that wild hair, whacky multicolored jacket, motorcycle-brand T-shirt, some dude with a camera and a white-and-orange thick striped shirt in the background.

So we put the thing on—mom had also given me her old record player years prior—and it proceeded to blow our minds. Tombstone Blues, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Ballad of a Thin Man, Desolation Row, etc.

But it was Like a Rolling Stone that cracked us apart with such spiritual, such unexpected force that, for fifteen minutes or so, we didn’t speak. We just listened, slowly turning the record up louder and louder. We didn’t even drink. We didn’t even look at each other.

Finally, when the record ended, I looked at Mike. He was in shock, as I was. Then he said, his eyes looking far away: “That, my fucking friend, is punk rock.”

“Yes it is,” I said.

We grabbed our forties and glugged.

~

Ever since then—the past 26 years—I’ve been a Dylan fan. All of it: The early folk stuff, the electric stuff of the mid-1960s, and beyond. The early folks stuff felt at the time, to our young, confused, naïve minds, to be the most “punk.” Rebel songs about civil rights, thinking for yourself, confronting The Man, retaining individuality at any cost, themes that punk picked up on later in the mid-1970s, starting with the Ramones. (And the proto-bands that came before them.)

But Dylan was much more than a punk before punk. He was a dark, mystical poet, some kind of thin, young Jewish singer-songwriter rock-n-roll sage. A madman bohemian who came from Hibbing, Minnesota (Duluth, originally) and ended up somehow in early 1960s Greenwich Village, meeting the right people and making a name for himself.

Over the years I’d picked at a few Bob Dylan biographies. I read up on him and his personal life, his career. As I got older and slowly faded out of punk in my mid-late twenties, I began to realize that Dylan had been a consummate artist: When a whole generation of 60s kids had wanted him to conform and hew to the folk-singer standard, he’d literally turned his back on them and had gone electric. Because Dylan was never really explicitly political. Sure, he sometimes sang political songs, but his ultimate aura, his spirit, was always rebellious, individual, contrarian, punk rock.

In short: Dylan was (and is) an artist over anything else. Many identities he wore, many myths he propagated about himself and his life, and many projections others placed upon and on top and around him. But in the end he was a consummate artist. A free-thinking, freewheeling human being who wanted one thing beyond all else: To play music and to do it on his terms.

~

I first heard about the new 2024 film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet, via one of my favorite podcasts, The Fifth Column. This podcast is a trio of three smart, hilarious and satirically biting journalists who changed the way I thought about politics, culture and media during Covid. Check them out here. Sometimes the boys discuss music, and they talked a long streak about the new Dylan flick. Michael Moynihan, one of the 5^th guys, even wrote a piece on the Dylan flick at The Free Press.

Ergo, I had to see it.

So Britney and I decided to go. We saw it at 12:45pm at a theatre downtown, literally down the block from Powell’s Books, called Living Room Theatres. Being down the block from Powell’s was perfect because I had a $200 gift certificate for the bookstore from Christmas/my birthday (New Year’s Eve) and it was burning a hole in my pocket. I wanted to buy some of the books on The New York Times’ Top 10 Novels of 2024 list. Mainly, I want to convince myself that these books are not that good and won unfairly. This may or may not be true. We’ll find out. I bought several of them. More to come on that. (I am currently 1/3^rd of the way through Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. Expect a book review on this, too.)

Anyway. The theatre was great. We walked in a couple minutes late. The titles and stars were on the screen still. Dylan, right when we opened the door showering irritated viewers with a bar of outside light, was just off the bus or train or thumb rides in Greenwich Village carrying only a pack and his guitar.

Anyway, our seats were right in the center of the theatre with comfy chairs and even a little table next to us. We got comfortable, took off coats, and watched.

The short of it: I loved the film. I thought Chalamet was incredible as Dylan: At first it was slightly hard to believe it…but as the film progressed I started to buy it full-tilt-boogie. They got the hair right, especially a bit later in 1965. He looked wild and haggard, sensitive, intelligent and mysterious, which at the time he by all accounts very much was. Joan Baez, to be sure, was much more beautiful in the film than she was in real life. Britney pointed out—and I think she’s right—that the girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, played in the movie by Elle Fanning, looked, dressed and sounded much too contemporary for the early 1960s. Her crimped blond hair seemed from now. Her speech seemed almost riddled with ADHD. It was not as believable as it could have been, we both felt.

But overall I think they captured the tone and mood of the Village in the early 60s—based on what I’ve read and heard from my mom and others who went through this period—and the strangeness and deliriousness of Dylan hitting the folk scene at that time. Pete Seeger is played by Edward Norton, who I also thought did a powerful acting job. There were crucial asides such as Dylan’s friendship with Woodie Guthrie, his dynamic and clashing relationship with Baez and the tension between her and his girlfriend, the letter exchanges and friendship between him and Johnny Cash.

The clincher, the absolute climax, was, of course, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, wherein Dylan went electric and Seeger, in mad desperation, tried to cut the show but failed. Everything changed from this one show. Dylan went off on his own. He made it clear that he was doing his own thing, driving his own car on his own road which wouldn’t be hindered myopically by folk music. Seeger and his people wanted to restrain and shape and use Dylan. Dylan wanted to do what he wanted. It was a powerful moment.

After the film I Googled it and read some articles discussing how the film was, overall, in general, fairly accurate, but definitely not 100% biography, by a long shot. Turns out it is much more like autobiographical fiction, a lot of truth wrapped up inside total fiction, time compressions, name-changes, mirages, illusions, etc. Dylan himself authorized the film, and he tweeted that he respected the movie and Chalamet’s acting. He assured people he was good with it. In fact, Dylan supposedly had them stick in a totally fabricated scene himself, of his own choosing which Mangold was sworn to silence on. Givin Dylan’s mythmaking, this makes sense.

I won’t get into what was fact vs fiction. All I’ll say is that, like any good autobiographical novel—I write these kinds of books and stories—it brings in truth and non-truth, mixing them together in order to, if you do it right, bring readers (or for this film, viewers) magically somehow actually even closer to truth, though emotional, spiritual truth, not exact literal truth. That’s what A Complete Unknown seems to be good at: It shows us Dylan as he was in his own mind, Dylan as he felt at a certain time and place, from 1961 to 1965, the years he forged his identity as a poet and singer-songwriter, leading up to his grand, to some angering, metamorphosis as a rock-n-roll star and consummate, uncompromising artist.

So, if you want the accurate details of the man: Go buy a biography of Dylan. But if you want the deeper man, watch this film. Really, you should do both, of course. And you still won’t know him. Not really. Can any of us truly be known through film and writing? I do not know.

But perhaps that’s the legacy Dylan’s early days provide us: He was a complete unknown who became an unknown known. In other words: Fabulously famous, incredibly projected upon, mysteriously enraptured by art, passion and contrarianism.

Doesn’t get more punk rock than that.