Real Life Rock Top 10: January 13, 2025

Special All "A Complete Unknown" Edition!

What I found most compelling in James Mangold’s movie about Bob Dylan’s first years in New York, from his arrival in the folk world in Greenwich Village in 1961 (“a reality of a more brilliant dimension,” as he described it in his Chronicles in 2004) to his escape into rock ’n’ roll on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (“I didn’t know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed, I’ll tell you that,” Dylan said at a San Francisco press conference months later), is that (1) everyone wanted to talk about it. Are you going? Have you seen it? Where? Who was in the audience? And of course, What did you think? What most people I talked to or heard or heard about said was straight (2): “I absolutely loved it!” That included a woman who went to Hibbing High School with Bob Dylan (“My grandson’s comments were he never would have made that music if he had an iPhone”) to a woman who claimed she had had to show her ID to get in (“to prove I was over 75”). It took in a fourteen-year-old who was moved to tears over how the connection between the Dylan character and a mute Woody Guthrie was so evidently deeper than the connection between Guthrie and a good-hearted Pete Seeger, his musical and political comrade since 1940 (and, caught in just a few camera exchanges, that was also deep truth: “Pete Seeger is a singer of folk songs,” Guthrie said to a friend in 1961. “Bobby Dylan is a folk singer”) and a woman leaving the theater overwhelmed by the fact that, finally, any of this actually happened: “What would our lives be without Bob Dylan?” I didn’t hear anyone complain about this didn’t happen like that or that didn’t happen at all. It’s a movie; people watched it as a movie. I mentioned to a friend, an American historian whose own book on Dylan delves into parallels and antecedents others have ignored, that for me, the pieties of folk music, the push-pull between the insouciance of the Bob Dylan character and the rectitude of Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger, a reincarnation of Henry Ward Beecher without the adultery, was getting very tiresome until Will Harrison’s Bob Neuwirth shows up, and suddenly all that falls away. Dylan’s inseparable pal in 1964 and 1965 (the torso of the man standing behind Dylan on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, the shot centered precisely on his crotch, is Neuwirth’s), he’s an imp of the perverse. He radiates fun. The Dylan character catches that and suddenly there’s a whole new energy in the story—and the feeling is that even if you know exactly what happened, you can’t tell what’s going to happen, only that something will. “Yes,” my friend said, (3) “I found the movie ok but feh! (and really disliked how they presented Suze) until exactly that moment, and it was all smiles from then on. It’s also when the fiction really kicks in: the ‘Rainbow Quest’ scene above all (a kind of Dylan/John Lee Hooker/Big Joe Williams parable that also puts Pete in his proper place, still part of the musical mix) but also Cash at Newport in 1965, the scene in the Viking Motel room, e&c. The more you know, the better those are. I also enjoyed the reinvention of facts, like what I take to having Neuwirth weirdly channel Liam Clancy and his brothers performing ‘The Irish Rover,’ except not, at an Irish bar like the White Horse, except not.” Maybe the fiction in the film is the real story (4): “I didn’t much care for the film,” said a director who in 1993 made a documentary about “Highway 61 Revisited,” “but I will defer to my 21-year-old daughter’s view that she knew little about Dylan before the film and even less afterward.”