Serving Somebody

A Complete Unknown and the Figure of Bob Dylan

Jordy Cummings

April 29, 2025

A Complete Unknown

by James Mangold and Jay Cocks

Searchlight Pictures

2024

Our Bob Dylan

One of the most frustrating, if entertaining films of 2024 was James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet embodies a figure of Dylan that is as physical as it is discursive. His performances and singing are certainly meant to be precise, not interpretive, but the young movie star manages both. Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton are equally authentic and precise as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. Yet it is with Barbaro as Baez that we start to realize the inherent flaws in the edifice. Baez, an exceptionally important historical figure in her own right, is simply a means to an end in this film (in spite of Barbaro’s performance). Said end is a new myth of Dylan for a new generation of young people actually buying physical music again. You can save accuracy for the birds and bees; Dylan, well-ensconced in the making of this film, had his mind on his money and his money on his mind. This new stunningly apolitical and misogynist myth of Dylan will be explored below, but the principal aim of this writing is to serve as a vital corrective.

In doing so, I will start by attempting to show Bob Dylan’s public historical role as an artist and storyteller and why it is important, in particular in this case, to get it right. Setting him in his proper historical context and in relation to radical left politics, I will then engage with what Dylan scholarship refers to as the “figure of Dylan.” There are a lot of truths and tall tales in the myth of Dylan, yet the film reinforces the latter—even adding a few whoppers to the mix. Indeed, the myth of Dylan is perhaps even more established in cinematic or televisual form than musically speaking. After this engagement, I provide not an alternative myth of Dylan, but rather a historiography that complicates, if not obliterates, the primary aspects of this myth. Expanding on themes developed in the first part, I will examine Bob Dylan’s relationship with the radical left and counterhegemonic culture as such. I show how the film not only misconstrues his and his comrades’ activism but renders it a frivolity. To add to this, I set my lens to panorama and briefly engage what I call the “long sixties” as a whole, before arriving finally at a key moment, what Dave Marsh called the moment when “rock and roll” became rock. This was when Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

Bob Dylan is a product of social relations set in motion and sustained by the far left, understood broadly. Folk music and its attendant cultures were produced by an infrastructure of dissent that was often instrumentalized by, but could never be reduced to, the Communist Party. Trotskyists, Christian socialists, anarchists, even strikingly apolitical existentialist types all swam through the folk scenes emerging in the late fifties and early sixties. They did so first in New York, then in other major cities such as Toronto, whose Riverboat birthed the careers of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. Dylan thus came of age as a cultural producer in which the logic of the left was common sense. Dylan was at a time very politically active, spending much of summer 1963 travelling and performing for the civil rights movement in the South. He was socially close to all flavors of the left and had ties to The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in particular. He had a healthy suspicion of the Communist Party types who would attempt to instrumentalize him and pigeonhole him. Yet if he would move beyond this scene he did not (at least at the time) give up its values. Indeed, like much of his generation’s rejection of the mores of the old left for the culture of the new left, his shift in focus was in keeping with trends in radical culture in general. This is all to say that he is our Dylan. Dylan came of age and learned his sensibility in our movement.

Dylan’s midsixties work (including going electric) is often misrepresented, thus resituating him as an apostate to the political left. I debated Bill Crane on these points nearly ten years ago in the pages of Red Wedge.¹ The debate, to a large extent is less qualitative—most Dylan scholars, let alone fans, think that this is some of the most vital music of his career. Dylan going electric and all that entails, along with his move away from didactic songwriting is seen, in this lens, as bourgeois individualism. Yet what could be more critical of the bourgeois individual than to bemoan the contingency of life, “like a rolling stone.” Hence, my contention that this is to miss the forest for the trees and to imbue the storyteller with the power of a prophet. Dylan going electric is a historical moment, first and foremost in a formal sense. While eschewing a strict foundationalism, this was the moment in which all of the ingredients of what the critic and Marx translator David Fernbach referred to as a “rock aesthetic.” Fernbach defined this as the domination of rhythm over melody, musical melody over vocal (if not lyric), and, in particular, the primacy of the rhythm section, the bass guitarist and drummer.²

Fernbach made these points in a somewhat infamous set of debates in New Left Review with Perry Anderson. The two of them both writing under pseudonyms is telling of the New Left’s insecurities about its cultural sensibility. In response to Anderson concentrating on the political and cultural significance of rock music and counterculture, particularly the breaking down of barriers between audience and performer, he argued against establishing a formal aesthetic criterion. Fernbach, on the other hand, argued that to allow for what was specific about rock music, one had to establish its distinctive form. Agreeing with Anderson’s take on political significance, Fernbach nevertheless took issue with the instrumentalism of Anderson’s take. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards didn’t write “Street Fighting Man” due to being close to the Trotskyist International Marxist Group (IMG). They became close to the IMG for the same reason they bemoaned the lack of fighting organization in a “sleepy London town.”

This then raises a question for the left, defined broadly: who is our Bob Dylan? As there is no singular Dylan, the figure of Dylan remains contested as much as all culture does. But I submit that the facts and framework are with us, from the standpoint of actually existing historical impact as well as “checking the boxes” of any valid aesthetic criterion. The question is thus raised: why Dylan? At the time and for at least a decade after the period portrayed in A Complete Unknown, it would be no exaggeration to make the claim that the left, in both its old and new forms, saw Dylan as an inspirational figure. It would be equally apropos to make that claim today, at least in some quarters. Well after Dylan’s alleged apostasy, Huey Newton did deep dives into his lyrics, in particular “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Dylan in turn was one of the few white musicians to do solidarity work and write songs for George Jackson. Later on, he appeared at benefits for Salvador Allende.

More directly, Dylan, with his colleagues and cothinkers invented a musical and cultural form.³ His role has been mystified to a point of absurdity, but his significance as a historical actor, if anything, is underrated. If we take seriously the role of cultural production in constituting counterhegemonic politics through countercultural practices, Dylan is to this constellation a figure on the level of Lenin for the Russian Revolution or DaVinci in the Renaissance. He is not a mythologically singular figure, but he actually is a historically singular figure. Indeed, and as I am trying to show, the myth of Dylan obscures his achievements and limitations. From the world-shaking to the quotidian, Dylan had a part in every major cultural shift in the English-speaking world and beyond in the last half century, even showing relevance with his COVID-19 opus, “Murder Most Foul,” which I engaged in New Politics.⁴ He was even the first person to get the Beatles high. Yet the underlying politics of all this are obscured, that of the cultural as well as political shift—from “folkie” to hipster, from old left to new left. By failing to connect the cultural to the political shift (and indeed trivializing the cultural shift), critiques from the left thus appear as individualist and perhaps implicitly anticommunist.

…within the context of the dystopian future America shown in the film, there’s only so much he can do, as you gotta serve somebody, and sometimes the Lord is as bad as the Devil. It is this apolitical fantasy of a Dylan shorn of his political role that animates A Complete Unknown.

How does this jibe with Dylan the man, the Christian fundamentalist-turned-supporter of the Lubavicher Rebbe and Ariel Sharon, only to finally be apolitical for the last forty years? How does this jibe with someone who apparently wrote whole songs about his turn from the organized left? The role of the poet, the musician, the lyricist, with respect to social relations and the potential for counterhegemonic practices is well captured by Dylan’s colleague, Grateful Dead lyricist and poet Robert Hunter. In “Lady with a Fan,” named for the Gustav Klimt painting, and a part of the Terrapin Station suite of songs, Hunter presents us with a figure of the storyteller.⁵ This storyteller spins a somewhat nonsensical yarn about a sailor and a soldier both being dared to declare their love for a beautiful woman, in some sci-fi/medieval Terrapin Station otherworld. The storyteller merely tells the story. It seems mysterious as it is mysterious. The storyteller has no choice but to represent what he saw, to “shed light, but not to master.” This is the role of the poet, the lyricist, the cultural producer writ large within capitalism. To shed light on what is seen, even if obscured by how one’s situated, and thus it is up to us whether we can see the light, or merely a reflection—an appearance. And thus, what is needed is a breaking down of this mythical appearance, and its “figure of Dylan,” and really come to engage what Dylan did, in order to gather how much, or how little light he was able to shed. It is to this figure that I now turn.

The Figure of Dylan as Form of Appearance

Stevie Wonder once had to remind Bob Dylan how to be Bob Dylan. As seen in Bao Nguyen’s wholesome Netflix documentary on the recording of “We are the World,” The Greatest Night in Pop, a confused and shy Dylan looks completely out of place and nervous. While the likes of trouble-making Cyndi Lauper, drunk Al Jarreau, the truly charming Huey Lewis, and the calming presence of Bruce Springsteen mingle in the hothouse environment of a specific parcel of time in which Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Quincy Jones could put together this charity recording, Dylan is bewildered. When called upon to sing a solo version of the chorus to overdub over one section of the song, Dylan is lost. It is only with Stevie Wonder providing him a vocal arrangement, sung in the classic and oft-satirized eighties Dylan voice to boot, that Dylan is able to get a shot of courage to record his memorable part.

Can it be that it was all so simple? In more extended raw footage of the scene with Stevie that has sat in the dark caverns of YouTube for at least a decade, one sees Dylan meticulously and quite dedicatedly attempting take after take trying to find the right harmonic intonation to sing overdubbed above the main melody. Stevie and others attempt to buoy him, but this wasn’t the picture of a confused man-out-of-time that we see constructed as the figure of Dylan in the documentary proper. Rather this was a seasoned, consummate professional, open to advice and input from his colleagues. At one point, he asks Stevie for an idea on a vocal arrangement. Stevie obliges, and that is the arrangement we hear over the final version of that forty-year-old strange cultural moment. This is the rarely seen, actual Dylan. He is curmudgeonly, perhaps a bit rude, but certainly not the figure seen on screen much of the time, whether documentary or dramatized. Yet Nguyen, like most filmmakers as pertains to Dylan, edits the footage to conform to how most would imagine the figure of Dylan, circa the mid-1980s.

The figure of Dylan that Nguyen deploys is one that appeared first in press conferences, then in Don’t Look Back, the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of Dylan’s spring 1965 British tour that Kurt Cobain once called the only good rock documentary of all time. Of course this didn’t include the cultural accoutrements, notably 1965 Dylan’s genderqueer tendencies, well portrayed by Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’s 2006 experimental Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. Rather, this figure of Dylan constructed by Pennebaker’s cinéma verité is a bit of an asshole. No sincere music nerd with a hint of humanity can watch the scenes of Dylan mercilessly punching down and making fun of the brilliant and very different-from-Dylan English folk musician Donovan without cringing. At one point he was a serious activist. Indeed, footage of Dylan in July 1963 at a voter’s registration rally playing one of his most radically sophisticated songs, “Only a Pawn in their Game,” is shown. But this is juxtaposed to the smarty-pants New York Jew, an emergent cinematic and televisual archetype at the time. This was quite a shift from the Dylan who a few years earlier identified with the Midwest.

Yet this is the Dylan, the disheveled paragon of asshole sixties frigid cool, that keeps appearing. Dylan is cool with it, as he has been from the start. But this is just one Dylan persona. Todd Haynes finds (at least) six in his experimental film. This is not to mention, of course, Pennebaker’s other film of the following English tour, the never released (but not hard to find) Eat the Document, this time with The Band. Dylan and bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel (hauntingly) are stoned out of their minds on heroin for much of the film. Foreshadowing the film under analysis here, the moment of Dylan’s electric turn in the United Kingdom is reduced to sensationalism. In reality, as Mike Marqusee points out, organized booing campaigns were backed by the Communist Party, and the experience for Dylan and his bandmates was harrowing. This may explain the turn to narcotics. A memorable scene occurs in which even his limo-mate John Lennon is concerned at his intoxication. Dylan, of course, nixed the release of this film. He liked the Dylan that Pennebaker had constructed, hence hiring him to make an official film the following year. Yet that same Dylan in the context of addled escape from fans who felt betrayed was a whole different story.

Dylan has appeared on film a number of times, as variations of this mythological figure of Dylan. Notably, he is in Sam Peckinpah’s New-Hollywood Western Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. A brilliant film, Dylan’s influence on it is as much his score (including the classic “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”) as his Chaplin-as-tramp performance as the enigmatic Alias, who appears in an unexplained mystery to be of some effective comradeship to Billy the Kid, played by fellow musician Kris Kristoferson. He is like David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth: his visage is all the connotation needed. This figure appears in Dylan’s own quite odd and completely out-of-print experimental film of the famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Renaldo and Clara, whose conceit was later reused in the absolutely cringe Dylan/Martin Scorsese mockumentary on the same tour.

Iconography surrounding the figure of Dylan (“The Man in Me”) was a clear influence on the Coen brothers sixties-veteran comic noir, The Big Lebowski. Indeed, characters based on both John Goodman’s Walter and Jeff Bridges’ Dude are in Masked and Anonymous, the very strange (and frankly bad) 2003 film cowritten by Dylan and Seinfeld and Borat writer/director Larry Charles. In this film, which hews perhaps closest to Dylan’s own view of himself beyond appearances, Dylan plays a rock star not dissimilar from himself who is being sprung out of prison to play a big show promoted by a corrupt Albert Grossman-esque promoter, played by Goodman. Bridges is the journalist who uncovers “the man,” but Dylan is only a pawn in their game and is swept up in the madness. It is for completists only, but has good music, including perhaps the best-released version of “Cold Iron Bound.” The core theme is there: Dylan is a pawn in their game, even if he is more than that. But within the context of the dystopian future America shown in the film, there’s only so much he can do, as you gotta serve somebody, and sometimes the Lord is as bad as the Devil. It is this apolitical fantasy of a Dylan shorn of his political role that animates A Complete Unknown.

The “postmodern” quality of [I'm Not Here] perhaps renders Dylan unknowable. But in doing so, it focuses on the public Dylan, the figure of Dylan and its irreducibility. The problem with A Complete Unknown, more than anything else, is that it presumes that what is significant is the private Dylan.

Perhaps the only film of Dylan that really captures the artist as a whole is Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. Six characters deconstruct the figure of Dylan in their performances by way of an exquisite screenplay by Haynes, one of the most theoretically rich filmmakers. This figure of Dylan, at its core, comes with Cate Blanchett’s performance as Jude Quinn—a stand-in for the Dylan of late 1964 into 1966, the Dylan who goes electric. This part of the film is shot entirely in black and white, evoking Godard. Quinn, like a character in a contemporaneous Dylan song, is always out of place. A genderqueer figure, Quinn chain smokes, speaks in aphorisms, pops amphetamines, bursting the bubbles of journalists, fans, lovers, and friends. Their confidence is not that of the cocky but cute Chalamet, but one that, by 1965, did not need to put on any airs. Blanchett and Haynes’s figure(s) of Dylan may be mythical, but these are generative myths.

Bob Dylan arriving at Arlanda Airport in April 1966 with Robbie Robertson and tour manager Victor Maymudes. Source: Svenska Dagbladet/Wikimedia Commons

These myths help us understand what Dylan was engaging, lyrically and sonically: evocations of historical figures in odd circumstances meant to be cryptically autobiographical (as “Shakespeare in the Alley” in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”) alongside loud electric guitars and pounding drums.⁶

During the live electric Newport show—portrayed as so much legend as will be seen in A Complete Unknown— Quinn and their band’s guitars and drums become machine guns, and they shoot at the crowd. This very well takes the piss out of the Newport legend. We are also presented five other Dylans, one of whom is not actually Dylan but an actor playing Dylan—hence Heath Ledger has not only been a joker and a thief, but also an actor playing an actor playing Dylan. The “postmodern” quality of the film perhaps renders Dylan unknowable. But in doing so, it focuses on the public Dylan, the figure of Dylan and its irreducibility. The problem with A Complete Unknown, more than anything else, is that it presumes that what is significant is the private Dylan. Yet this creates too much confusion. To gauge the relationship, then, between positing Dylan as unknowable, in the sense of Haynes, and positing Dylan in a mythologized sense, as elsewhere, we then need to look at the proverbial transition from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan.

Postcards of the Hanging

In Bob Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, way up north near the Canadian border, there was an infamous lynching in June 1920. Three Black men, circus performers (“the circus is in town” goes the lyric in “Desolation Row”) were accused on trumped-up charges of raping a white woman. A lynch mob kidnapped the men from the county jail and they were hung on the corner of First and Second, only two blocks from eight-year-old Abram Zimmerman, on whom it had a profound effect. This effect was compounded by the mechanical reproduction of a postcard commemorating the hanging sold and collected among the people of Duluth. This was a story that Zimmerman later passed onto his son Robert, later to become “Bob Dylan.” Hence “postcards of the hanging” as Dylan begins his greatest poem, “Desolation Row.”⁷ Dylan’s compulsion to get out of even liberal Duluth, out to New York City to meet Woody Guthrie and play folk music—but more to the point, to be a very dedicated civil rights activist and troubadour —is rooted in hearing this story. Yet this also revealed to Dylan the limitations of liberalism as portrayed in the poem as the “blind commissioner” who is in a trance. This was Minnesota liberalism. We see echoes of this blind commissioner today as institutions of American civil society attempt to “split the difference” in opposing but also capitulating to the Trump regime.

After the introduction of the postcards of the hanging, Dylan points out that they are “painting the passports brown.” Most Dylan scholarship considers this is a clear reference to what we may call a process towards fascism. A process not unlike, say, abducting green card holders in a process reminiscent of the “disappeared” in Latin America. Or a process of rendering trans or nonbinary identity effectively criminal and subject to paper disappearance. Or perhaps the removal of references to the Civil War. This could be the competition between MAGA camps, the Yarvinites and the Bannonites, playing out through dueling public Nazi salutes. Throughout “Desolation Row,” Dylan presents us with a parallel world, the essence beyond appearance, in which the esoteric politics are rendered exoteric. In that same first stanza, it is pointed out matter of fact that “the riot squad was getting restless.” Dylan had comrades on the receiving end of riot squads, and it is not unlikely that he had to run from one at some point during his civil rights work.

One would not know anything about restless riot squads from A Complete Unknown. On the key political question, the film is an utter disgrace. With politics rendered invisible, it is as if these are magical figures operating outside of human history. Yet this is not Robert Johnson meeting Satan at the crossroads or any other such myth. This new myth of Dylan, approved by the man himself (who “used to care, but things have changed,” as the song goes), is of a figure that must betray those who mentored him in order to achieve perfection. And in this act of betrayal, Dylan affirms his fidelity to the idea he had in the first place. The “Dylan” character somehow gets to New York, never mind the actual story of him travelling with friends. There is no indication of what he’s doing or where he’s staying. He goes to visit Woody Guthrie and forms a relationship that is frankly offensively off the mark. Guthrie serves as the foundational figure for what he needs to “move beyond,” so-called folk music. And Pete Seeger, who forms an entirely fictional mentor-mentee relationship with the young Dylan, even giving him a crash-pad, emerges as far more of a central figure in Dylan’s universe than he was historically. Aside from Joan Baez, Dylan’s broad base of contemporaries within the New York folk scene are simply invisible.

So in the place of a story of an artist emerging as a crystallization of the cultural and intellectual transition between old and new left, we are given a coming-of-age story about a beautiful boy with talent beyond his years. The closest we get to any reference to actual politics is Pete Seeger’s appearance before HUAC.⁸ Yet the context, the blacklisting, the witch hunts, McCarthy—nothing is mentioned. To a young viewer with little knowledge of the era, it simply establishes Seeger’s credibility and limitations. These were limitations that Dylan had to transcend. Yet we are hardly able to see these limitations portrayed. Seeger actually quite impressively avoids pleading the fifth by simply refusing to answer questions as to who he’s played for and neither confirming nor denying anything. Classically, he said that he’d play for all persuasions, from Rockefellers to hobos. Even when citations are mentioned of him playing specifically at CP functions, he renders the questions ridiculous. The point of the questioning, after all, were his songs. It is in this spirit that Seeger offers to play one. Yet the film plays this for an entertaining moment, shorn of context. A great moment of a cultural producer taking the hard path in front of redbaiting hooligans is played as maudlin fan service. Seeger is just someone stickin’ it to the man by playing a folk song instead of answering questions. Thus, we are introduced to the political context that Guthrie and Seeger operated within as some kind of frivolity.

In one moment, while Dylan is arguing with his partner—based on the communist Suze Rotolo, whose politics are almost completely obscured in and of themselves—we see Dylan on the TV screen performing at the March on Washington. That Dylan performed at one of the most historic mass marches of his time was less important and relevant to the filmmaker James Mangold and the hack screenwriter Jay Cocks than Dylan being a precocious manchild with skills beyond his level of maturity. Black people, let alone the Civil Rights movement, are at best a prop in this film. At one point, Dylan has a Black girlfriend, a composite, perhaps of the subject of the song “To Ramona.” At another point, Dylan is a no-show on Pete Seeger’s radio show, so a stereotypically drunken and completely fictional Black blues singer is the substitute for Dylan, who ends up showing up and jamming with Seeger and the blues singer. Later this blues singer appears on screen to smile and look proud of Dylan “going electric,” suggesting legitimacy in the face of all the booing and jeering. Naturally, this also was fictional. Screenwriter Jay Cocks had invented this one-dimensional trope of a character precisely to have an audience identify with the individualized figure of Dylan. Truly cool figures, like this blues singer, or Johnny Cash for that matter, could see what all those old folkies were missing.

Even beyond the directly political, there are elements missing with regards to the constitution of folk music culture and the transition from the culture of the old left to that of the new left, or as Abbie Hoffman once put it, from cocktail culture to grass culture. On that note, there are practically no drugs in the movie. This is patently absurd, especially if focusing on the frequent amphetamine user Bob Dylan’s private life in the midsixties. Being up all night is a common refrain in his lyrics at the time, notably in “Visions of Johanna,” “ain’t it just like the night to play tricks while you’re trying to be so quiet.”⁹ Perhaps even more significantly, there’s no pot or hash to be seen anywhere. To both Dylan and Beatles fans, the story, mentioned earlier, of how Dylan got the Beatles high for their first time is that of legend. Dylan misheard the refrain in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I get high” instead of “I get by,” and reportedly handed each band member a fully rolled joint, which they just each thought were hand-rolled cigarettes. So in the Beatles, everybody must get stoned. This is not even to mention Dylan and The Beatles’ mutual influences on one another. Would Dylan have gone electric and the Beatles incorporated more acoustic textures if not for each other? Probably not. And Dylan and Lennon were epic drug buddies.

The most significant formative period of one of the most important cultural producers of the last few hundred years is reduced to a love triangle that didn’t really exist in the ways portrayed, and like Black people, women are monochromatic means to the narrative’s ends. The fantastic performances of Monica Barbaro and Elle Fanning as Joan Baez and “Sylvie” respectively, serve as no more than props. Not only that, while Dylan is “a bit of an asshole,” to quote a line of the film’s dialogue, the audience is directed to identify with him. Beyond her vaguely hinted at radical politics, Sylvie (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo) is a “drag.” She is always bumming Dylan out about his lack of authenticity and tall tale about being in the circus. Couldn’t she see how great he is? And there is some implicit suggestion (playing fast and loose with history) that Dylan (who did encounter CORE and other key activists through Rotolo) only started writing radical music to cash in on the existing movements and to “show her.” And this in turn is what gets Joan Baez’s attention. Yet to wrap it up neatly, Rotolo is still pining for Dylan in 1965, even if they’d been apart for over a year and Dylan was already with his wife, Sara Lowndes, about whom he wrote the stunning love song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” In turn, if he was cheating with anyone, it was with Edie Sedgwick, the subject matter of “Just like a Woman.” This is well-portrayed in a camp fashion by Todd Haynes.

Seen through this angle, Bob Dylan, while containing multitudes, is someone who was firmly rooted in and grew out of the politics of the sixties. Dylan was not unique in the sense that he was above everyone else. He was unique in that he was of everyone else…

It would not be impossible to tell Dylan’s story only refracted through his personal life. After all, from “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” to Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s relationships were the stuff of his art. Blood on the Tracks and in particular, “Idiot Wind” is some of the best art about the tragedy of a break-up ever produced. On songs like “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Shelter from the Storm,” Dylan reverses his early use of romantic metaphors to tell political stories, later using political metaphors to tell romantic stories. So if there’s music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air, this means that it’s a good situation to meet a potential partner. But was Papa’s bankbook big enough? If Hollywood wanted to take the politics out of Dylan and tell a fascinating story about art and love, there are plenty of parts of Dylan’s output that would have been more appropriate, and perhaps less fictional and, thus, less inherently conservative. But that was not the choice that Hollywood, Jay Cocks, James Mangold, and Bob Dylan made. Hence, it is worth reconstructing that world in a broader sense, to examine the actuality of Dylan, our Dylan. And this means going beyond the figure of Dylan and disassembling the Forrest Gump, “everybody look what’s going around” narrative of the sixties, an era in which counterculture and the radical left overlapped in ways that neither camp recognized. This is something that I’ve elsewhere called a “missed encounter.”¹⁰

Dylan beyond Dylan

The general public consciousness of the sixties is expressed by connecting its music with broader changes in social relations, often as telescoped by a film soundtrack, like that of Forrest Gump or The Big Chill. One hears, through the selection of Hollywood wizards, the changes within what Bowie called the “warm impermanence” of sixties abundance-capitalism degenerating in the chaos of the Vietnam War and generational splits.¹¹ The technological wizardry and integrationist politics of the now-disgraced Phil Spector and his “girl groups” give way to the Beach Boys and the Wall of Sound, then the Beatles, and then things start getting political and one hears “stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s goin’ round,” from Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” It could be that or “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire or perhaps, most elegantly, Sam Cooke’s stunning “A Change is Gonna Come.” If a film producer really wants to throw a curveball, she would counterpose these songs to the likes of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” or General Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.”

It is notable, however, that all of the above-mentioned songs use the broad idiom of American folk music and its component parts: the emphasis on layered rhythm guitars or pianos and organs (both acoustic and undistorted electric), the emotively delivered vocals, and its appeals to the passions. The dominance of rhythm over melody, yet not without an “ear worm” quality. The dominance of both over discursive content, yet the discursive content must be able to grasp hold of the listener’s consciousness and must be uttered in a memorable way. Yet at the same time, their political content is not always as straightforward as the tone taken. “Eve of Destruction” and “For What It’s Worth” are strangely detached, worried about the world, but not at all suggesting any agency that would attempt to change things. Both songs feign a detachment and narrate the fear underlying the abundance, the fresh memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “paranoia strikes deep.”

Tellingly, this can apply as well to Haggard and Sadler’s songs. Haggard later admitted that he played up a patriotic persona but also, like his friend Johnny Cash, opposed the Vietnam war and was covered by the Grateful Dead. “Okie from Muskogee” is as much a joke on its audience as it is a celebration of those “straight Americans in white small towns, where they don’t grow their hair or smoke marijuana, and instead love the police and military and are proud of their heritage. Sadler’s “Green Berets” is in turn surprisingly sanguine and even antiwar in regard to what can amount to a lament at the unrecognized dirty work performed by the Berets, the assassinations and covert operations, the ass-covering for the top brass. These were all laments disguised as didacticism, an attempt at the real deal protest songs that set in motion the era’s music, less by virtue of their politics than by virtue of a combination of their genuine quality, the “right place, right time” phenomenon, and the folk music movement’s embeddedness in the social movements (notably the Civil Rights movement).

The political music that reached a mass audience during the long sixties can be analyzed as of three types—the generally political or protest songs, often about the Vietnam War and, at a certain point, proclaiming the need for revolution. Relatedly, there is music that refers to the conjuncture or acts as a distillation of a certain moment, exposing a certain contradiction. Finally, and perhaps most lastingly, there is the music that—by virtue of being performed by those embedded in a commonsensical fashion to the new left and counterculture—acts upon the prevailing assumption that revolution was around the corner, and they were there to provide the soundtrack. Hunter S. Thompson memorably wrote of this period as a time in which a great mass of Americans felt that they were “riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave,” a wave that would crash in the early seventies. Dylan himself saw the emergence of what looked like an inexorable wave in early songs like “The Times They Are a-Changin.’”

Seen through this angle, Bob Dylan, while containing multitudes, is someone who was firmly rooted in and grew out of the politics of the sixties. Dylan was not unique in the sense that he was above everyone else. He was unique in that he was of everyone else, yet, like jesters of all eras, he happened to be what we now call an “influencer.” He had a very cool look and, as Haynes used mischievously, Dylan (at many points throughout his career) had a sexy, androgynous “Ziggy Stardust” aesthetic well before Bowie. This itself was something that the “long haired hippy” narrative sometimes occludes, that genuine hippy communities were, at least for gay men, more queer friendly than mass society. To have a great deal of affinity for social movements was to be cynical, and Dylan certainly had that side—which was a necessity, both culturally and materially, for cultural producers at the time. Yet for Dylan this was genuine. He certainly cultivated (but then broke with part of) an audience in and around his affinity for the movements. Yet his evolution—from simple to complex and back again, from pills to weed, from prophetic to surreal to satirical—occurred within the context of evolutions within cultural production, music and film in particular, spheres of cultural production intimately intertwined with counterhegemonic cultural milieux. It is in this spirit that I will once more turn back to A Complete Unknown.

You’ve Not Seen Nothin’

If A Complete Unknown is about any one event, then it’s about Dylan “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and his battles with the Newport organizers, such as Seeger and the Stalinist petty bourgeois entrepreneur Alan Lomax. Dylan’s first 45 rpm single, “Mixed Up Confusion” by the way, was electric, so the notion that he first “went electric” in ’65 is apocryphal. Yet, the issue to the notables at Newport was not so much the electrification of instruments; it was the lack of respect for the dignity and formality, the tradition of the folk festival. The purer of heart Pete Seeger had a visceral reaction to the unadulterated noise of it all. On a certain level, Dylan’s antifolk “Americanist” fans give Seeger a bad rap on this one, even if he may have tried to take an axe to the soundboard. It really freaked him out, This was not a tasteful Stratocaster or bass guitar accompanying primarily acoustic instruments. This was loud. Yet more important than Seeger’s opposition was that electric rock music was off brand for hucksters like Alan Lomax.

The standard left line on Lomax is reflected in the late Mike Marqusee’s Chimes of Freedom, later to be republished and in print now as Wicked Messenger.¹² This has become the standard text telling leftists who feel conflicted about liking Dylan that Dylan had a good side and a bad side. Marqusee’s didactic and self-flagellating book was recently excerpted in Jacobin, reinforcing the simplistic narrative that Lomax and the Newport Folk Festival organizers, while wrong in their reaction to Dylan’s artistic shift, had to be understood in the context of their defense of the sanctity of their “scene” (one that was already signed to massive corporate record labels and had outsold rock music for quite some time). The festival, Marqusee tells us, was a nonprofit entity and so, of course, they’d see Dylan using electric instruments and playing dissonant music as a threat to this anticapitalist purity. Marqusee credited Lomax with seeing in Dylan an enactment of the potentiality of the vulgar Christopher Lasch/Thomas Frank line with regards to “commodification of dissent.”

Dylan was close with the queer antiauthoritarian leftist poet Allan Ginsberg. He spent time in and around Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. He was not limited to the idiom that Lomax and Seeger wanted to keep him in (albeit in different ways). This is precisely because it would have been a betrayal of an authentic development of the folk form…

In reality, Lomax was the worst kind of capitalist, in particular with respect to how he dealt with Black and poor musicians. History has not been kind to Lomax, who the critic Dave Marsh describes as the twentieth century’s greatest thief of cultural recognition. Those who know American folk music know Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, and notably his song, “Goodnight Irene.” Ledbetter, an impoverished Black folk blues pioneer, died before his song become an iconic hit for The Weavers (notably including a certain Pete Seeger). The problem was that, on the cusp of the Weavers’ release of the song, there needed to be a copyright. So, Lomax put his name on the copyright and received the lion’s share of the considerable royalties from this song, which would eventually become a folk music standard in spite of Ledbetter’s widow and family’s continued impoverishment. Lomax did culturally significant work in excavating and recording the likes of Guthrie, blues pioneer Robert Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton and others. He even recorded Muddy Waters’ first recording session, but Waters was reportedly hip to Lomax’s reputation and beat a hasty retreat.

Beyond the gatekeepers like Lomax and Irwin Silber, it was not so much the case that Dylan was moving away from folk music, as it was that folk music was only one stop along the way in his development as an artist. Yet this shift towards electric instruments was actually an anticommercial move, one that would polarize his audience. My father and his friends, folkie kids even before their Bar Mitzvah, would hear that Dylan sold out. He was a turncoat. And that meant something to younger folk music fans, especially white Jewish ones. We remember our turncoats. Yet all this was an endogenous development in the form of music he played. There was no songwriting development as such, it was structural and textural. And besides, his first single “Mixed up Confusion” had the same electric blues “folk rock” feel in 1962.

As of 1965, Dylan was not of Alan Lomax’s folk milieu. Rather, he was associated with anarchist and Beat generation fellow-traveller Harry Smith. Smith, an antiquarian and occultist, had the best-known collection of recorded folk music aside from Lomax. Both of their anthologies are necessities in understanding the folk music form in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet Lomax, a sanctimonious Stalinist, curated his songs so they all seemed like authentic cultural expressions that he could sell to a bourgeois audience while making money. Meanwhile Smith, a much more meticulous scholar, and a collector of 78 rpm records, had more actual knowledge of the forms and their origins in cultural cross-pollination than Lomax could imagine. Smith’s anthology is separated into four volumes, only one of which amounts to “topical songs”—in other words, abolitionist songs, suffragette songs, work songs, union songs, antiwar songs and so on. For Smith, folk music was just as much murder ballads, jug-bands, folk blues, and tales of the devil. It was hillbilly music and the music of poor Black folks, Indigenous people, and Melungeons. Smith did not take credit or make much money for his meticulously produced anthologies, replete with his drawings.

As is seen in the pioneering music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Dylan was close with the queer antiauthoritarian leftist poet Allan Ginsberg. He spent time in and around Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. He was not limited to the idiom that Lomax and Seeger wanted to keep him in (albeit in different ways). This is precisely because it would have been a betrayal of an authentic development of the folk form, as understood by Smith, and in the last instance, perhaps by Seeger as well. What’s more, the most “topical” political songs on his spring 1965 half-electric, half-acoustic album Bringing It All Back Home were the electric ones. Songs like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” were precisely marks of being one of the proverbial “sons and daughters beyond your command” to the folk music establishment. Yet money doesn’t talk, it swears.

The actuality of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (nevermind the fiction of Johnny Cash being there to affirm Dylan, and Dylan’s performance with Joan Baez) is not all that poorly portrayed in A Complete Unknown. Yet without the deep context of the politics at work, the fisticuffs between Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman and Alan Lomax seem to be played for dramatic effect. The desperate arguments over unplugging Dylan between Seeger and the sound crew seem purely generational. This is not all inaccurate. Grossman and Lomax did get into a fist fight over Grossman’s acts at the festival. That fight was also about the Butterfield Blues Band, which Lomax didn’t approve of, as integrated electric blues bands were unacceptable to him. Grossman certainly had his own material interests in mind, as did Lomax. But it wasn’t all business. Dylan is a passerby here, nervous, seeking out recognition; in this film he is not, as was depicted more accurately in I’m Not There, a rootin’ tootin’ gun totin’ outlaw ready to open fire on the bourgeois crowd. The decontextualization of Dylan at Newport led to comparisons (not entirely inaccurate) between his Newport performance (as seen in the film) and Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the 2025 Superbowl. Bigots who complained about Lamar were the same as folk purists, apparently, who rejected Dylan.

Marqusee was not wrong to explain the left confusion over Dylan. He was wrong in his entire approach to Dylan, in the same way A Complete Unknown is wrong. It approaches Dylan the person but attempts to cover Dylan the figure. While the film tries to replace history with trivia, Marqusee replaces history with a mistaken attitude about the role of cultural producers in a given period’s politics. Dylan, a Jewish young man at a moment fewer than twenty years after the Shoah, and someone strongly antiracist and antiwar (if not with well-formed politics), spent some time writing very topical songs that allowed him to be taken on as a cash cow by the “folk music craze.” Later, he felt held back, like many young artists do when their ostensible managers don’t want them to develop. Yet there was never any reason to believe that Dylan could be held to this one-dimensionality. What is more distressing is the lack of problematization of the cutthroat petty bourgeois “folk music” industry by Marqusee, something fortunately done by other historians of Americana like Dave Marsh and Peter Guralnick and in the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis.

This kind of confusion is in turn what has become the dominant American Studies version of Dylan as purveyed by the likes of Sean Wilentz. The moment of going electric, for Wilentz and other anticommunists, was Dylan throwing off the shackles of Stalinism for the free liberty of being an electric inventor. This is the Forrest Gump narrative, the Life Magazine narrative, and indeed the narrative of A Complete Unknown. The individualist Dylan cuts his teeth with radicals, but they hold him back. He needs to become a full fledged Great American. Yet this story’s erasure of the underlying politics at play renders left-critiques as anticommunist ones. This erases perhaps the key political process going on for Dylan’s generation, the transition from the old left to the new left, and the corresponding cultural shift.

Dylan’s legacy deserves better than the view, shared by leftists and liberals, that he abandoned politics. Besides being untrue, it would serve leftists well to have a more sophisticated understanding of the role of cultural production. This is the fabric of our lives. At a time in which the “riot squad is restless” and the masters of war are in power everywhere, the executioner’s face no longer needs to be well-hidden. Sixty years after Dylan’s classic early work, things have changed and in many ways, the reality that we collectively face is starker. A cultivated understanding of how, at the very least, art can both inspire and allow us to reflect on these circumstances is something that would benefit many of us.

A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan, Counterculture, Culture

Jordy Cummings

Jordy Cummings is a writer, activist, and cultural theorist, based in Toronto. He earned a PhD from York University in 2017 and taught there for many years. He has written extensively on Bob Dylan and maintains a culture-oriented substack at https://chaosofmemories.substack.com .

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