The Life and Opinions of Andrew Rilstone: A Complete Unknown

On 28th August 1963, at the Washington Memorial, shortly before Martin Luther King gave a quite well known speech, Bob Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game. If you had been there, you would have heard it. The brief clip we see in A Complete Unknown is as close to the real footage as the director can make it.

On May 17th 1966, during a performance of Like a Rolling Stone at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a disgruntled folkie really did heckle him with the word “Judas!” If you’d been there, you would have heard it. Dylan really did reply “I don’t believe you!” In the movie he tells the band to “Play it loud”; on the bootleg you can distinctly hear him say “Play it fucking loud.” But the event is transplanted to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Dylan definitely did premier the song at that event. Some of the audience certainly booed, although they weren’t as hostile as the Manchester crowd. Did Pete Seeger really try to terminate the set by cutting the PA cables with a fire axe? That’s the story; you probably heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who was there. So perhaps we should call it an oral tradition; perhaps more appropriately, a folk tale. Seeger subsequently said that his problem was not with the volume or the amplification but simply that the PA was so distorted that you couldn’t hear Dylan’s lyrics.

On January 29, 1961, Bob Dylan certainly visited Woody Guthrie in Greystone Psychiatric Hospital. (“Wardy Forty”, Woody called it.) But no-one knows what they said to each other. Dylan, in his sort-of autobiography, pointedly doesn’t tell us. Bob certainly wrote Song To Woody (to the tune of Guthrie’s own union song, 1913 Massacre) but there’s no reason to think that he actually sang it to him on that first visit.

The story of Dylan gatecrashing a live recording of Rainbow Quest (Pete Seeger’s public access TV show) is pure fiction; but the scene catches Dylan’s arrogantly modest charm to a T.

There is no reason to think that it was Johnny Cash who leant Dylan a guitar for his Newport encore. But the made up incident perfectly encapsulates the story that the movie is telling us. Old versus new, folk versus rock, conformist versus rebel, acoustic versus electric.

There is what happened. There are stories about what happened, which we hear second or third or fourth hand from people who were almost definitely there. There are people’s honest reconstructions of the kinds of things which probably must have happened. There are stories which people make up out of their heads to tell a version of the truth, or to comment on what really happened. And there are out and out lies.

Religious fundamentalists and religious skeptics would insist that only the first kind and the last kind count. If it didn’t really, really, really happen, then it’s a lie.

Someone once asked Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, if he believed that Three Kings really visited the baby Jesus. “It’s a legend” he said “But it works quite well as a legend.”

Todd Hayne’s absurdist I’m Not There turned Bob Dylan into six different fictional characters. None of whom are called Bob. The final incarnation is an aging Billy the Kid who faked his death and is still hunted by Pat Garett. (Dylan, of course, wrote Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door for the movie Pat Garett and Billy the Kid.) "Billy" represents Bob as he was in 2007, when the film came out. At the end of the movie, the aged gunslinger hitches a ride on a train and finds the guitar which belonged to “Woody”—the eleven year old black kid who represents the early, pre Greenwich Village Robert Zimmerman in the open segment. The message appears to be that Dylan ceased to be true to himself when he transitioned from folk to rock, and that his later career was a return to his authentic roots.

Which works: if you think that Blonde on Blonde was an aberration and Good As I Been To You was a return to form.

At the end of A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan—having just deliberately ruined the Newport Folk Festival—tries to return a harmonica to Woody Guthrie. Woody gave it to Pete Seeger to give to Bob as a gift. But Woody won’t take it back. Scoot McNeary looks astonishingly like the late photos of Woody Guthrie, and manages to bring a large amount of characterisation to a man who, at this stage in his life, could barely move. They say acting is all about the eyes. (Are we okay with an able-bodied actor being cast as a man with late-stage Huntingtons?) It’s a scene rich with symbolism. Guitar or harmonica? Woody or Johnny? Folk or rock? (Own up: you thought, just briefly and for a second, of Luke and Rey, didn’t you?) Woody watches as Bob rides off on his bike, and Dusty Old Dust plays on the sound track one last time. Bob has moved on, and Woody can accept that he’s moved on; but Pete Seeger can’t.

Which may, for all I know, be, true. Woody Guthrie was nothing if not an iconoclast.

Pete tells Bob to take care on his motorbike. I was very much expecting the final caption to be that a year after Newport, Dylan crashed his bike and didn’t tour for eight years. (It decides to tell us about some Swedish literary award, instead.) Are we supposed to be able to fill this detail in for ourselves?

There are a whole lot of stories you could tell about Bob Dylan. There were a whole lot of mornings between 1961 and 1966. The Beatles' story has a known trajectory—Quarry Bank, Hamburg, Cavern, Palladium, India, Dakota. (Phillip Norman got it down to four words: Wanting, Getting, Having, Wasting.) Dylan is mostly still about the music. I suppose you could make a movie about how the radical firebrand came out of retirement to record an album of Christmas carols, or how he found, and perhaps more interestingly lost, Jesus. But “how Bob went electric” is as close to being a myth as anything is.

Bob arrives in New York. Bob meets Woody. Pete takes Bob under his wing. Bob becomes famous. Bob transitions into a rock star. The fans boo Bob and Pete is sad. The King died and then the Queen died.

I like Good As I Been To You very much indeed. The first time I ever heard Martin Carthy, he opened his act with Jim Jones in Botany Bay, and my first reaction was “Bob sings that.” Dylan is probably covering Nic Jones’ version. Carthy doesn’t feature in A Complete Unknown, although it is mentioned in passing that Dylan has spent some time in London. We don’t see him introducing the Beatles to weed either. Girl From the North Country is a little bit under the influence of Scarborough Fair and Bob Dylan’s Dream is a reskinned Lady Franklin’s Lament. Everything in folk is connected to everything else in folk. That may be what makes it folk.

Films about the lives of famous people; and in particular, films about the lives of famous musicians have a bit of a bad rep. Telling the stories of people who thousands of people worship with quasi-religious devotion. People who are still alive and could sue. Lives which mostly consisted of being driven from concert venue to concert venue in a tour bus. The best possible biography for a writer is “he stayed at home and wrote”.

Jake Kasdan’s wicked parody, Walk Hard, is often said to have killed the genre. Johnny Cash watching a newsreel about Folsom Prison and hoping he never goes there. Johnny Cash in bed with his doomed baby brother, listening to the Carter family and saying “June is my favourite.” Except—hang on, no—those scenes were in Walk the Line, the serious Johnny Cash movie, not the send up.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t completely avoid the cliches of the genre. We do see Bob Dylan waking Joan Baez up in the middle of the night because he can’t think of a good line to follow “He not busy being born…” We do see him strumming an unfinished Girl From the North Country over breakfast at Pete Seeger’s cabin and saying he doesn’t quite know how to end it. We do listen to Pete telling young Bobby things he already knows for the benefit of anyone from posterity that might be eavesdropping.

But it mostly avoids that kind of thing. It doesn’t quite feel real but it does feel like a dusted down polished up Platonic form of what the reality must have been; like a series of glossy album covers coming to life before your eyes. Bob can’t walk through Greenwich Village without passing at least one Man with a Tamburine. It fools us into thinking that we are looking over character’s shoulders and being carried back to the smokey Gaslight Cafe or the fractious Fort Adams State Park. Which obviously we aren’t and obviously we can’t be. But that hardly matters. From this moment, this is what the 1960s will look like and anyone who was actually there will become an increasingly marginalised heretic. It isn’t a matter of printing the legend. The legend has replaced the fact. That’s in the nature of legends.

Bob Dylan is not played by a CGI monkey. He does not help the Mayor of Pepperland defeat the Blue Meanies. Maybe he should have done.

I never saw William Shakespeare take a bow at the Globe or heard Wagner conducting the Ring Cycle. I did once meet Stan Lee, but I was nine and he was looking the other way. But on six different occasions I have been in the same room as Bob Dylan. Big rooms, with a couple of thousand other people in them, but still. I am a folkie and the preeminent artist of our generation is a folk singer. Correlation does not imply causation.

Timothee Chalamet’s face looks enough like Dylan’s to suspend disbelief; and his charisma and sexuality would carry any number of movies; but his attitude and poise and presence are hypnotic and his voice astonishes. When Blowin’ in the Wind plays over the end credits I can’t tell if it’s Timothee or Bob.

How does this stuff even work? Could Timothee have a career as a folksinger if he ever gets bored with the movies? Or can a good actor “act a good singer” without really being a singer himself? (Or is there, perchance, some technical trickery involved?)

We’re witnessing an unrepeatable moment in the history of acting. A moment which has already passed. There are only a few years or months when an actor can play a child turning into an adult. At 29, Chalamet has played his last teenager. The transition from the ingenue who arrives in New York with a guitar slung over his back and the cult figure who snarls “I don’t believe you” to thirteen thousand fans is astonishing from a purely technical point of view. Watching Paul Atriedes grow from an awkward young nobleman into the emperor of the universe was a virtuoso performance even if you aren’t interested in giant worms, but this goes way beyond it. Almost thou persuadeth me to go and see Willy Wonka.

The film is overflowing with fictionalised folk icons; giving it endless replay value for obsessives. The man who gets punched at Newport—that’s folk archivist Alan Lomax. The man who would be happy to let a white blues band play Newport—that’s Paul Yarrow. (We briefly hear Puff the Magic Dragon being played as the older Bob smoulders through Greenwich Village.) But who is the guy singing Irish Rover in the pub? Bob’s civilian girlfriend is called Sylvie, reportedly at Bob’s own request; although surely everyone knows that she represents Suzie Rotolo? Rotolo wrote a book about their relationship and is the subject of a very good song by Ralph McTell, so it is hard to see whose privacy is being protected; although it does feel like a gentlemanly gesture. The word iconic is over-used and should probably only refer to objects of religious veneration. But if anything is iconic, it’s Bob and Suzie/Sylvie on the cover of Freewheelin’, which we catch a brief glimpse of here.

The jester sang for the King and Queen. You either go to the church of your choice or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital. If you are a certain kind of folkie, “Bob visits Woody in hospital” is kind of like “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.” In this telling of the story, it is Pete who invites Bob to play for his last idol.

“Are you shy?”

“Not usually.”

It’s stuff like this that prevents me from writing an actual review. When a film has literally made you cry before the opening credits have finished, you don’t want to think too much about what it was doing and how it worked. I’ve seen it twice and expect to see it twice more. Sofa-buddy, who likes Dylan fine but is not necessarily the folk-head I am, said that it feels like a completely different movie the second time through: there is so much detail, so much structural nuance, that you could almost believe that you had slept through the first viewing.

Edward Norton inhabits Pete Seeger. Or possibly vice versa. Impersonation and acting are not exactly the same thing: Michael Sheen precisely mimicking Tony Blair’s mannerisms is a different proposition from Anthony Hopkins playing fictional characters based quite closely on Picasso or Freud or CS Lewis. Norton is so good that you wonder if reports of Seeger’s death were exaggerated; or if some kind of deepfake CGI had brought him back from folk heaven.

This kind of film does, indeed, raise questions about Modern Technology. Will we still want to watch brilliant actors pretending to be famous people when computers can create illusions that are realer tham the real thing Does part of our engagement with A Complete Unknown depend on our knowing that what we are watching is not Dylan at Newport but a human being interpreting Dylan at Newport—that what we are watching, despite its factual basis, is a story. (It works quite well as a legend.) What would it feel like to be presented with a 1960s fly-on-the-wall documentary of what Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were doing on the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis while at the same time knowing that it was built of ones and zeroes with no human involvement? (And would that necessarily be more voyeuristic than watching actors role-play the moment—which probably never happened, in any case.)

And come to that, what is the point of getting Paul Atriedes to pretend to be Bob when yards and yards of actual footage exists? We watch Peter Jackson’s Get Back and imagine that we are just watching the Beatles, unmediated, as they were. But in a way it is just as artificial and constructed as King Kong.

You could say that A Complete Unknown is really Pete Seeger’s story: but I notice that El Sandifer has already said that she thinks it is really Joan Baez’s. It’s an old saying that “Doctor Who” is not a name but a question, and the TV show was about the people who have asked the question. Dylan is an enigma; the film plays cleverly with his propensity to fib. Joan only find out that his real name is Zimmerman when she stumbles across a childhood scrapbook. When he repeats the preposterous story of learning guitar from singing cowboys when he worked for a travelling circus, she tells him directly he’s full of shit. But where, in fact, did he learn to play? When Seeger puts him on stage after Joan Baez at a folk club he’s clearly already accomplished musician who knows how to work an audience. If Ramblin’ Jack Eliot gets a mention, I didn’t spot it.

Unless you find his fellow traveller politics unforgivable—and some of the pre 1942 party line pacifism is pretty uncomfortable in hindsight—I have never come across anyone with a single bad word to say about Pete Seeger. He meets Bob and takes him home and puts him on stage and smiles so warmly when the audience start to sing along with the Times They Are A Changin'. When an officious night nurse won’t let him sing Blowin’ in the Wind in the hospital, Bob gets all teenaged and shouty, but Pete calls the nurse by his first name and talks about how he is sure they can smooth it over. It’s just the song. He honestly doesn’t mind that Bob is world-famous while he is still doing public service TV shows provided people are hearing folk music. A shamelessly cartoonish Johnny Cash personifies Bob’s darker angels, positively encouraging him to ruffle feathers and tread mud on the carpet. Seeger is John the Baptist, happy to decrease while Bob increases. But he is also Frankenstein, destroyed by the monster that he himself unleashed.

Except he’s not destroyed: he smiles and clears away the chairs and carries on. We see him singing This Land Is Your Land on the steps of the court having been convicted by the HUAC for contempt of congress. Half a century later he sang it at Barak Obama's inauguration.

It’s hard not see Dylan as a bit of a prick: a shy, unsure of himself prick in the first half, and a supremely confident prick in the second. Could he really not have played an acoustic set at Newport and launched his electric career in some other venue? We see him in a double act with Joan Baez, realising that the audience only want to hear Blown’ In The Wind, refusing to sing it, claiming that his guitar is broken, and storming off stage, leaving Joan to carry the set like a trouper. I understand that singers aren’t juke boxes. I understand that Bob had moved on. Like Mitch in A Mighty Wind, he knows that that man no longer exists. I never once heard Chumbawamba play Tubthumping, although Boff Whaley is very upfront about how being a one-hit wonder bankrolled all the more interesting things he’s done since. But Ralph McTell, who has for decades primarily been a very accomplished bluesman endlessly, graciously, revisits Streets of London. “As long as you want to hear it, I want to play it.” Present day Bob sometimes sings Blowin’ in the Wind and sometimes sings All Along the Watchtower and sometimes sings Desolation Row but never ever does a greatest hits concert. The closest I ever came to witnessing a Judas! moment was at a Cardiff concert when two out of every three songs were from the Frank Sinatra covers album.

Bob plays Blowin’ In The Wind on Woody’s iconic guitar, the one with This Machine Kills Fascists printed on it. (Pete Seeger’s banjo had “This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender” on it which tells you everything you need to know.) But a guitar isn’t a particularly traditional instrument. Real cowboys would have had squeeze boxes or fiddles or mouth harps. Woody took a song about a steam train and turned it into a song about a hydroelectric plant. Authenticity is a mirage; this stuff isn’t as old as we sometimes like to think. A lot of the “traditional” English repertoire was probably written for actors playing the roles of peasants in eighteenth century theme parks.

The Manchester footage exists. Some of the fans were angry; someone really did shout "Judas!" (Someone else shouted “What about Woody?”: I’m surprised that didn’t make it into the film.) Doubtless folk audiences are more genteel today than they were back then. The most hostile reaction I have ever witnessed is polite applause. (When Dylan toured with Mark Knopffler in 2007, it was the non-folk part of the audience who started to slow hand-clap Michael McGoldrick and John McCusker’s instrumentals.) When Jim Moray started to put electronic samples and night club beats into an otherwise traditional repertoire, some journalists tried to build him up as the bad boy of English folk. But the traddies embraced him almost immediately, because he was clearly very interesting and more importantly very good.

The film constructs the conflict as if the rebellion against acoustic folk is a rebellion against fame itself. Joan Baez, at the end of the film, says that Bob has freed himself from “us and all our shit.” And that reads pretty well into the Newport set, with “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more…” being a personal Declaration of Independence, and “how does it feel to be on your own” clearly about someone walking out on someone, and even his conciliatory acoustic encore, “its all over now baby blue” also about a break up. And he’s just broken up with “Sylvie” and done a live Carter-and-Cash style domestic row with Joan through music using “it ain’t me babe” as a weapon.

We don’t hear about Hattie Carol or Emmet Tell or really Medgar Evers. This Dylan isn’t a man with a cause. He’s rebelling against anything on offer. Maybe he really did borrow that coat from James Dean.