Author: George Marsden is a graduate of Glasgow University, where he read English and Classics. His writing has appeared in IM-1776, The Mallard, and Sublation Magazine, among other outlets. As song writing is the only form of modern poetic expression with a mass audience, George thinks it merits special critical attention. He also aims to counter the nefarious influence that Oasis have had on British culture.

Folk music, in nearly every meaningful way, is dead in the English-speaking world—and it has been since Dylan first entered the scene. Therefore, if Bob Dylan’s set at the Newport Folk Festival 1965 constitutes abandoning folk music, then he was right to do so. Folk music necessarily implies an organic tradition, and it hasn’t been proven that one survived the onslaught of TV, mass urban living, and the resulting cultural amnesia that we underwent in the 20^th century. As a film dramatizing the moment when this began to be recognised, James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown’ deserves watching, and re-watching, and re-watching again.

The starting point of that dramatisation is, of course, Chalamet’s Dylan himself. He does well by conveying a sort of stuttering confidence at the film’s start, which then grows in the direction of full-blown obnoxiousness as he navigates his love life with Sylvie Russo (a fictional stand-in for Suze Rotolo) and Joan Baez (Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro respectively). But the most important aspect of Dylan á la Chalamet is his obsession with songwriting. In one scene, Baez throws him out of her flat for almost forgetting she’s in the same room as he tries to pen a new hit. Earlier in the film, he watches the news of JFK’s assassination with the same look of boredom I recognise from women whom I’ve begun talking to about, well, Bob Dylan. Clearly, the scenes of the presidential skull exploding over the Dallas streets didn’t strike him as poetic. It seems that anything without connection to his art, or that doesn’t provide inspiration for it, is beneath him. In the end, it’s this uncompromising artistic attitude that prods him towards that conflict with the folk music establishment that forms the significance of that 1965 gig.

That establishment consists of the people who put on the festivals and nod along approvingly to Dylan’s harmonica playing. In the film, he navigates his relationship with it through the influence of two famous friends: Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). Norton’s Seeger rolls Magwitch and Joe Gargery into one man: benefactor as well as kindly father figure. Pushing this characterisation further towards the Gargery-esque is Norton’s combination of innocence and a sort of rustic wisdom, that quality Americans call (appropriately enough) “folksy”. To my ear, there’s something of Norton’s Primal Fear performance here.

Making this benevolent Seeger such a prominent part is key to the drama. Dylan’s celebrity grows and thus his use for Seeger wanes; and yet, the friendly overtures from the older singer don’t end. As a result, we expect the crescendo of their relationship to come in the form of a cruel rejection from the younger party (perhaps something along the same lines as Pip’s treatment of the ever-faithful Joe). Dylan’s turning up late to Seeger’s television programme and cringing at the sight of him through a Newport shop window only ratchets this tension. Skilfully, however, the film swerves the kind of break we were expecting.  The rupture is actually Seeger’s fault: it transpires that he isn’t even familiar with Dylan’s latest material. The father has not, it seems, been taking the son seriously. After some wise words from a drunk Johnny Cash, Dylan is propelled towards an act of self-assertion and decides to play whatever he wants at the famous headline set of the festival’s 1965 incarnation. Thus, Chalamet’s Dylan suffers the necessary disillusionment that frees him to produce ‘Highway 61 Revisited’.

Johnny Cash’s role in this sequence heightens the significance it has for Dylan’s artistry. Running into Dylan outside his hotel, he’s clearly just after having had a beer for breakfast, and his attempt to move his car is certainly amusing. But he strikes one as the sort of drunk who’s a change-in-wind-direction away from growling “What are you looking at?”: there’s certainly something menacing in Boyd Holbrook’s turn as the man in black. As such, Cash comes across as the dark alternative to Seeger. But the chaotic exterior and inebriation do not matter to Dylan. Behind them is an artist whose attitude resonates far more with his own than what Seeger is offering; an attitude prioritising lyrical insight, self-expression, and musical experimentation over faithfulness to tradition. Not that this is quite how Cash expresses it. He enjoins Dylan to “track mud on the carpet”, but I think he means much the same thing

Understood this way, ‘A Complete Unknown’ illustrates what was really at stake during the ‘Electric Dylan Controversy’. It wasn’t simply a local fight over the rights and wrongs of electric guitars in the province of folk music, but a microcosm of the wider artistic conflict between the claims of individual talent and tradition; of romanticism and classicism, if you want to put it that way. I think Peter Hitchens was wrong, in his recent review, when he claimed that the fallout was really over politics. This is the least superficial of all aesthetic debates; if art expresses all that direct communication cannot convey, then the side you take in this argument determines how you think we should go about that expression. In other words, it’s the very first aesthetic question we need to ask ourselves. And all arts come to be defined by their conventional forms; so what happens when those forms, hitherto the only way certain profundities found their way to the light, are rejected? For the crafters of those forms, the effect is no less than traumatic.

I suppose the film and its hero are on the side of individual talent, romanticism and tracking mud onto tradition’s embroidered carpet. The Newport committee are hardly appealing, and the act directly preceding Dylan’s at the festival is an absurdly old-fashioned chain gang mock-up. But I do wonder what the real Dylan would say about this centuries-long conflict. However, that betrays a prosy way of thinking—don’t you think? I think wanting direct communication from someone who’s laboured to say so much, and in such a particular way, is a kind of sin. The film itself does a good job of pointing to the songs themselves as the most important facts of Dylan’s life; if it’s answers from Dylan I want, I need only attend to them more carefully.