In ‘A Complete Unknown,’ Bob Dylan’s Politics Are Blowin’ in the Wind

It might at first seem obvious why filmmakers won’t leave the subject of Bob Dylan alone. Search “Dylan” and “movies,” and the list — from documentaries like “Don’t Look Back” (1967) to fictionalized treatments like “I’m Not There” (2007) — turns out to be surprisingly extensive. The man was one of our most idiosyncratic and arresting artists during a revolutionary period in our popular music. And for all its diffidence and evasiveness, his was the work most often held up as Important — no small claim in the realm of pop music, especially then — and he was the one ratified as profound, even before the Nobel Committee’s intervention. What actor doesn’t want to play a charismatically elusive genius? What director wouldn’t like to imagine himself or herself as a kindred spirit?

But there are other reasons Dylan remains snagged in our collective consciousness, especially now. Though at least two of his songs — “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” — have been irrevocably shanghaied as the examples of Protest Songs of the ’60s, his more fundamental role might have been to serve as America’s political songwriter for the apolitical. The lyrics for the albums “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are not only irreverently funny and freewheeling in their pillaging of high and low culture, but they’re also sardonic, ambiguous and offhand. They’re the opposite of earnest, and when they point out problems, they do it with a shrug. Like many of his countrymen and women, he periodically registered with clarity or even outrage the state of the status quo, but he mostly dismissed any notion that he should extend his fretting over it.

Those two albums were recorded roughly in the period covered by James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” the most recent cinematic tribute to Dylan, starring Timothée Chalamet, and the latest stone added to the Everest of such works. Though the drama begins and ends with Dylan’s devotion to Woody Guthrie’s work, the movie makes vividly clear how much more anarchic and exciting Dylan seemed than folk music’s other standard bearers, singer-songwriters like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, since they were stuck not only lamenting injustice but also promoting an agenda for social change. Dylan’s lyrics, on the other hand, mostly seemed to suggest It’s All Absurd or, more pointedly, They’re All Assholes, a sentiment that adorned more than a few political lawn signs in 2024. A huge number of our cultural heroes, fictional and otherwise, have prided themselves on not being political, on their individuality as their ultimate value. Think of our western heroes, or our private eyes, or the way so many presidential candidates, the very definition of the triumphant insider, try to position themselves as outsiders. And as anyone who has attended one of his concerts knows, the central characteristic of Dylan’s career has been to not do what’s expected of him, even to the extent of putting out one of the most godawful Christmas albums in the history of the genre. Dylan’s version of rebellion much more resembles that of Brando’s in “The Wild One.” When asked, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Brando famously replied “Whaddaya got?”

In “A Complete Unknown,” that same orneriness causes Dylan to rebel against the expectation that he will be a crusader for social justice, a rebellion we’re encouraged to support. Bob Dylan should be allowed to be Bob Dylan, after all, and we Dylan fans know that going electric enabled some of his greatest music. Poor Pete Seeger and Joan Baez are portrayed as sweet and well meaning but also comparatively pallid and hopelessly unprepared for the ferocity of the tumult that’s about to upend American life. But while valorizing yourself as unwilling to dance to someone else’s tune might make you sound like a revolutionary, and even make you sympathetic to revolutionary impulses, it also most likely leaves you poorly suited to contributing to collective action.