by Liam de Buitléar
For those of us on the left, the effect of art, particularly music, can often be an underappreciated influence on many of us. People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett has often mentioned how his love of punk and ska music influenced his politics when he was younger. For myself, hip-hop artists like Mos Def and Digable Planets, whose songs discussed issues like poverty, race relations, and police brutality, are an obvious early influence. Musicians like Neil Young, Public Enemy, and Rage Against The Machine can often be held in such high esteem by people on the left that it’s become somewhat of a stereotype.
However, when it comes to musicians who are so stereotypically beloved by people on the left, very few compare to the legacy of Bob Dylan. His early image of a denim-clad free-wheelin’ folkster enabled him to become one of the most iconic figures of the 1960s counterculture movement. Equally mythologised is the image of Dylan after he “went electric”, dressed in suits and sporting dark shades, the harmonica hanging around his neck being the only thing that survived this radical transformation.
For some older activists on the left, Dylan’s early work is untouchable. He possessed a knack for writing songs that managed to capture many people’s anger towards society, whilst using words that made them timeless. In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, Dylan recounts the murder of a working-class black woman by a wealthy male white socialite who only saw a short six-month sentence for the crime. It’s a track that, unfortunately, is yet to lose its relevance today.
When Dylan “went electric”, he didn’t just change the aesthetic qualities of his music, he also made a conscious decision to move away from the protest music that had won him so much acclaim and admiration. People weren’t so much bothered by the fact that he’d picked up a Stratocaster, as much as they were disappointed that the Dylan who wrote “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” had seemingly gone into hibernation with the release of records like “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde”, only waking from his slumber a decade later in 1975 when he released “Hurricane”.
The conversation around Dylan adopting electric instrumentation in his music has been completely exhausted over the last 60 years. It’s been beaten to death, resurrected, and beaten to death again. There’s very little purpose in rehashing debates about whether or not Dylan’s going electric led to a decline in the quality of his music (It didn’t, Highway 61 Revisited has earned its status as a classic) or in digging up arguments about whether or not he sold out the left-wing movements he associated himself with for riches. So, why talk about it?
The recently released Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown chronicles Dylan’s rise as part of the 1960s folk revival, his relationships with the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez before culminating with the controversy caused by his “going electric”, his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and his subsequent transformation from a champion of the downtrodden to full-blown rock star. However, it recounts the story in a rather dishonest fashion.
Despite it being a major element of the film, A Complete Unknown completely defangs the politics of the 1960s Folk Revival. Despite both of them being major characters in the film, there are virtually no references to Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie’s socialist beliefs. Likewise, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s politics are reduced to their involvement with the civil rights movement and their association with Martin Luther King, whose own politics have similarly been defanged and sanitised in American popular culture. Dylan and Baez’s opposition to the Vietnam War and support for the labour movement are similarly ignored to convey this bizarre image of an apolitical early Dylan.
Likewise, the controversy surrounding Dylan’s decision to go electric has the political element removed entirely as well.
Instead, the film frames Dylan going electric as a result of his unflinching commitment to artistic integrity. Dylan wants to go electric because he thinks he can make the best music that way, but Pete Seeger and The Newport Folk Festival organisers won’t allow him because it’s not “real music” in their eyes. They’re portrayed as stuffy conservatives who routinely beg Dylan to play more “wholesome” music using an acoustic guitar and decry his decision to go electric as being “poisoned by The Beatles”. The film goes as far as to retell the widely debunked urban legend of Seeger attempting to sabotage Dylan’s performance by taking an axe to his microphone wire before cooler heads prevail and the villainous Seeger is foiled before he can stop Dylan from becoming the icon he was destined to be.
In ignoring Dylan’s move away from protest music, A Complete Unknown manages to depoliticise the depoliticisation of Dylan, doing so to its own detriment, as including this wrinkle might have given the film more to say than “Oh look at Bob Dylan, isn’t he so talented and idiosyncratic and tortured?”. It might have given more to do to Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, who is tragically reduced to just Dylan’s lover and muse.
Whilst this depoliticisation does take more from the film than it adds, it’s easy to see the motivation; firstly, Dylan himself was involved with the production of the film, and I’m sure he was eager to soften his image somewhat, especially since the film routinely portrays him as being emotionally stunted and difficult to deal with, The idea of possibly portraying him as having “sold out” on top of these negative personal qualities might have painted him in too unfavourable a light, especially when this film will no doubt be many younger people’s first introduction to him and his music.
Additionally, the film’s release saw a fairly robust (albeit ultimately unsuccessful) Oscars campaign, being nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan, and Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress for Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez. Complicating the film with the left-wing politics espoused by Dylan and his contemporaries might have deterred wealthy Academy voters. It’s a real shame, not only because it’s disappointing to see the likes of Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez sanitised to appeal to liberal Hollywood sensibilities but also because the discussion surrounding formerly left-wing musicians who whitewash their politics as they become more successful keeps coming up again and again in today’s day and age. There are plenty of modern examples of this, like rapper Jpegmafia, who, despite making a point to voice anti-establishment left-wing politics and identifying as a communist in his earlier music, recently took to Twitter to chastise his fans for not supporting Kamala Harris in the 2024 US Election even though he had previously claimed to hate the Democratic Party. He’d also posed for a photo with Kanye West when he was wearing a t-shirt for the Nazi metal band Burzum. It’s no accident that these actions came at a time when he began to see a better commercial reaction to his music as he pursued a sound more in line with mainstream hip-hop.
Despite its flaws, A Complete Unknown is more good than bad, Timothée Chalamet is an excellent Bob Dylan who not only manages to capture all of the idiosyncrasies and bizarre turns of phrase Dylan is known for but also does a commendable job of mimicking his voice for the parts of the film that require him to sing. Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez is the best part of every scene she’s in, even if Baez is perhaps the biggest casualty of the film's insistence on telling Bob Dylan’s story according to Bob Dylan’s version of events. Edward Norton’s performance as Pete Seeger is perhaps the best in the film despite the inexplicable third-act heel turn Seeger carries out in order to give the brave and valiant Dylan a final boogeyman to vanquish in his quest to be understood.
A Complete Unknown isn’t just a good film, it’s a great film despite its dishonesty and liberalisation of the 1960s Folk Revival and Counterculture movements it portrays and one can imagine it serving as an excellent introduction to not just Dylan, but the wider left-wing folk culture that emerged in the 1960s.
Liam de Buitléar is a Limerick-based writer, filmmaker, and socialist activist with People Before Profit.