‘A Complete Unknown’ Channels the Secret of Bob Dylan

“A Full Unknown” is the uncommon Hollywood film that has impressed a reckoning. All over the place, on social media, in mainstream media, or just on the a part of so many who’ve seen the movie, a tingling dialog is happening — a form of collective meditation/investigation into who Bob Dylan was, who he’s, what he meant again then and what he means now. What’s placing is that little or no of that is Dylan nostalgia — i.e., the boomers getting misty-eyed with self-importance about “their” beloved icon. And if that’s what it was, it might be lame. (Nobody would hate it greater than Dylan.)

The Dylan dialog that’s been ignited may be very current tense and alive, and really exploratory. It’s concerning the film, nevertheless it’s larger than the film. It’s about everybody who has seen “A Full Unknown,” or everybody who merely grew up with Dylan, trying anew on the query: What was it about him? What‘s his magic, his maintain on us?

The explanation that’s a query we’re nonetheless wrapping our heads round is that the reply continues to be mysterious. In case you speak concerning the Beatles or the Stones (who, together with Dylan, make up the holy triumvirate of the ’60s Music Gods Who Modified Every thing), their majesty is infinite, but in an apparent manner we will all really feel what it was about. The Beatles did nothing lower than recolor the world’s DNA; we hardly must have them defined. The Stones, for many years, have been known as “the best rock ‘n’ roll band on this planet,” and that form of stated it.

However Bob Dylan, from the second he got here up, in 1961, had infinite labels hooked up to him — protest singer, people musician who “went electrical” — that in some way fail to explain him and his place within the universe. It’s not that the labels are inaccurate. He did begin off as a protest singer; he did go electrical, and that was a game-changing, world-shifting second. However none of that, in an odd manner, describes what’s transcendent about Dylan. And what I like about “A Full Unknown” — and what I feel the film has, in a manner, virtually been undervalued in doing — is that it channels the magic of Dylan far past these pesky labels. It exhibits you that what was lovely about him was one thing that may’t be put into phrases.

Many have famous that Dylan, as Timothée Chalamet performs him, is an deliberately mysterious and obscure determine, who speaks in tossed-off epigrams and ornery cryptic asides. He’s not about to let that factor referred to as dialog pin him down. When Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who has grow to be romantically concerned with him, says, “You’re form of an asshole, Bob,” that’s the dimension of him she’s referring to — that along with competitively dismissing her, he’ll make up stuff about his previous (like saying that he joined the circus) and refuse to cop to it, not permitting even his lover to pin down who he’s. In “A Full Unknown,” the Dylan we see is the unique too-cool-for-school indie-rock jerk. You’d higher consider that Lou Reed — probably the most notorious asshole within the historical past of rock ‘n’ roll — copped big dollops of that angle from Dylan, together with the essence of Dylan’s swaying-back-and-forth talk-singing type.

But if Chalamet’s Dylan have been merely a hooded determine who saved his ideas underneath wraps, it may appear that he was doing all of it for impact. Sure, he is form of an asshole, however what redeems that’s that he doesn’t simply come off as a gnomic enigma to the folks round him. He’s additionally a thriller to himself — an artist who channels what’s occurring round him however doesn’t actually need to clarify it, even to himself. That may kill the thriller. When Bob, within the film, talks about what Woody Guthrie meant to him, the purpose is that Guthrie’s people music touched this child from Minnesota on a stage past phrases and past rationalization. What he heard in that music, and took from it, was primal: not “protest” however one thing richer and deeper and extra timeless. A template of religion.   

And this ties into how we expertise Dylan’s songs within the film: as emanations of a spirit that render him not only a nice singer-songwriter however a drive, a cosmic messenger. The message of his music is religion. That’s why his impulse to go electrical is an act that the folkies, led by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), don’t perceive. It’s not simply that they like acoustic devices. They consider in concepts: the combat for social justice. Dylan does…and doesn’t. He believes in one thing extra private and un-sayable: the flexibility of a music to usher you right into a state of reverence, to carry you into the heavens.

One purpose why the Dylan reckoning happening now could be transferring to me is that it mirrors my very own journey with Dylan. For too a few years, every part I knew about him, and realized about him, bought in the way in which of my capability to actually hear him. Rising up within the ’70s, I had a lot of his information and listened dutifully to them, however I in some way at all times felt like I used to be lacking one thing. Merely put, I couldn’t grasp many of the lyrics, and that made me really feel like I used to be a C scholar in Dylanology. What did these torrents of phrases imply? I acknowledged that the “protest singer” label was one which he’d grown previous in just a few years. However what he’d by no means grown previous was how the boomers lionized him as a “poet.” I’ve by no means a lot cared for poetry; it doesn’t converse to me. And I felt like most of Dylan’s poetry sailed over my head.

It wasn’t till I used to be in my thirties that I started to actually hear Dylan, and to confront the good paradox about him: that his lyrics, a lot of the time, don’t matter all that a lot. I imply, they do and so they don’t. My favourite Dylan album is “Blood on the Tracks,” and there have been many days after I assume the best Dylan music is “Tangled Up in Blue.” I’ve listened to it 1,000 instances. However I don’t perceive 90 p.c of the lyrics. It’s a music that, maybe, displays the journey from innocence to the counterculture to the world past it, that charts the journey of his marriage to Sara Lownds, but it’s additionally about none of these issues. The music is concerning the feeling of it, of seeing the life you’ve lived become visible even because it recedes like a misplaced freeway. And that’s proper there within the sound of it.

What I bought extra in contact with as I bought older is that Bob Dylan’s genius is all about sound. The hushed lilt of his voice on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The ecstasy of the harmonica solo in “Completely Candy Marie.” The way in which he doesn’t simply sing a lyric — he seesaws it, and brays and caresses it, and deposits it proper into your soul, even while you don’t know what it means. And when he went electrical, he achieved a sound — singular within the historical past of rock — that was candy and livid on the similar time. He lifted you up not the way in which Woody Guthrie did however the way in which J.S. Bach did. Regardless of the subject occurred to be, Dylan was singing non secular music. A tough rain was gonna fall, however the miracle was that Dylan had captured that rain and made the reality of it lovely.       

Music is sound, and what Chalamet captures, together with his extraordinary lived-in impersonation of Dylan, is how Dylan used the sound of his voice, and the glittering percussive majesty of his guitar taking part in, and the thriller of his phrases as a option to contact the uncanny, to carve out, in music after music, a privileged five-minute area within the universe, and to ask us to pour our feelings into that area. “A Full Unknown” isn’t the best rock biopic (that will be “Sid and Nancy”), nevertheless it brings off one thing singular inside the world of rock biopics. It lights up the holy area that Dylan created, permitting you to see it and listen to it and contact it and reside inside it, till you notice it’s life that’s electrical.