Mike Schneider: Incompletely Known | Déjà vu Bob Dylan 

“A Complete Unknown,” the hit end-of-year holiday movie of 2024, takes its title, as most of us know, from the chorus of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Some of us might also hear a line from the first verse, slightly altered: “People call, say ‘Beware doll, another Dylan movie?’ — you thought they were all just kidding you.”

The movie is real, no kidding. It’s also — worth saying — not a documentary, more like a well written historical novel. Think Wolf Hall. It’s set in an historically real situation, with considerable liberty about details (sometimes including chronology), and with characters based on real people, who necessarily speak invented dialogue. Critics have in general liked the movie, noting terrific performances (Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro), and it’s nominated for many 2025 best film awards.

The popularity and critical success — a not-easy-to-achieve combo — have to do not only with the singular genius of Dylan, an unknown 19-year-old bohemian who becomes the icon of an era, but also with the historical-cultural milieu in which the movie’s events — real and not — occurred. The Greenwich Village folk revival — also known as “The Great Folk Scare” — really happened. 

With the perspective of 60 years, it’s fair to say that the revival was, in many ways, over when Dylan plugged-in with the Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Some people booed — for complicated reasons, says Elijah Wald in Dylan Goes Electric!, his 2015 book that inspired “A Complete Unknown.” For most, the problem was probably less the electricity per se than the volume — Dylan insisted that it be loud. 

The booing became news, but what gets lost, says Wald, is that many people cheered. Some writers compare it to the near riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913 Paris for the debut of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” While many of us may imagine ourselves to have been not among the boo-ers, Wald says we shouldn’t be too sure. There was more going on in the cultural air of Newport ‘65, more expectations and attitudes, than we can easily appreciate now. Boo or cheer, it was the moment — for the sake of pinning down a “moment” — when disconnected strands of music merged and what had been, basically, party music for teenagers began to be rock-and-roll as a serious art form. 

To tell the story of this moment, “A Complete Unknown” covers a relatively short span of time, January 1961 (when Dylan arrived in New York City) to July 1965. It’s a period when many Americans discovered “folk music.” Performers in Greenwich Village, along with Dylan, included Odetta; Joan Baez; Maria Muldaur, Tom Paxton; Dave Van Ronk; Phil Ochs; Ramblin’ Jack Elliot; Peter, Paul and Mary; and prominently in the movie, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. 

Mostly in their 20s and 30s, they released LPs and began to get FM airplay. They toured colleges and urban clubs, mainly on the East Coast. A few of them, including Van Ronk, Odetta, and Paxton, are represented in the movie as side characters who speak no lines, or very few, but give folk-music fans — many of us in the senior ranks — a thrill  of recognition.  

Baez, who first performed while in high school in Cambridge, near Boston, recorded her debut album in 1960. In November 1962 she was on the cover of TIME. Peter, Paul and Mary were assembled as a group by their manager Albert Grossman — also Dylan’s manager — as part of a purposeful plan to attain mainstream success for folk-music and, in particular, Dylan songs (for which Grossman held half the rights). Grossman understood that Dylan’s abrasive, Woody Guthrie-esque singing wouldn’t appeal to a middle-class audience not far removed from the Swing Era and honey-voiced crooners like Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby and the boss, Frank Sinatra. 

The breakthrough song was “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan wrote it in 1962 and included it on his second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” The first version to hit the airwaves, however, was Peter, Paul and Mary’s 45-rpm single. Released in June 1963, it sold 300,000 copies in the first week and made the song world-famous.

Most likely for the convenience of keeping the story within the compass of its main characters, “A Complete Unknown” twists history to give the “Blowin’ in the Wind” recorded debut to Joan Baez. More significant for many, ultimately, than who scored the big hit is that, beyond any other song or event, “Blowin’ in the Wind” led the world outside Greenwich Village to begin to discover Bob Dylan. 

Some might say, at the same time, that historical accuracy matters, especially when it involves an event about which — 60 years after it happened — millions of people buy tickets to see a movie. If I were Peter, Paul or Mary, for instance, or anyone involved in their career-making record, I would no doubt prefer that the movie get it right.

Other ahistoricisms include that Pete Seeger wasn’t in Woody Guthrie’s room at Greystone Hospital in 1961 when Dylan first visited. Nor did he bring Dylan home with him to meet his wife, Toshi, and children. Nor did Dylan sing “Girl from the North Country” the next morning, since he didn’t write it until almost two years later, after his first trip to London — when he’d heard Martin Carthy sing the traditional ballad “Scarborough Fair” (uncredited original of Simon & Garfunkel’s version). Nor did Woody have his guitar with him in the Morrisville, New Jersey hospital, so no one there saw the now-famous sticker: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” 

Nor did Dylan and Baez sing “It Ain’t Me Babe” together (and to each other) at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. That happened in 1964. Nor did anyone in Dylan’s audience at Newport 1965 scream “Judas!” while he sang “Like a Rolling Stone.” That infamous rock-and-roll moment, captured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home,” occurred a year later at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. 

Woody enjoyed Dylan’s presence — no doubt about that. Over several months of Sunday afternoon visits with friends, the Gleasons, in nearby East Orange, the two developed mutual appreciation. Some of us might be surprised to know which, between Dylan’s singing and song-writing, Woody most admired. “That boy’s got a voice,” he told the Gleasons. “Maybe he won’t make it with his writing, but he can sing it. He can really sing it.”

With this movie, director and co-writer James Mangold has put himself in the role of Dylan fabulist. He’s created — with no disclaimer — an imaginary mythology, unfaithful to history. It’s had a huge buildup, with magazine articles and preview clips on TV. That the reviews have been unanimously favorable (as far as I know) . . . means, not least, that the studio spent millions on promotion.

Personally, I prefer the documentaries, Scorsese’s and D. A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back,” which captures moments of Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. I also deeply enjoyed “A Complete Unknown.” The best part for me: The songs, more than 40 of them (most, but not all, by Dylan), well performed (no doubt with some auto-tuning), presented mostly in snippets of a verse or less, via room-filling sound, even if not quite the real deal. 

Classic Americana — echoes of Whitman — greets us at the opening and sends us home as the credits roll, “a tinny wire recording” of young Woody Guthrie, his voice “sharp and true,” a waltz, moderate tempo: 

I’ve sung this song and I’ll sing It again

Of the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been,

Some of the troubles that bothered my mind

And a lotta good people I’ve left behind, singing 

So long, it’s been good to know ya . . .

This dusty old dust is a-gettin my home.

And I’ve got to be driftin’ along.

FADE OUT.

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Mike Schneider, an award-winning poet and essay-writer, has three times taught his Bob Dylan course for the Osher Lifelong Learning Program at Carnegie Mellon University. His poetry collection, Spring Mills, came out in 2023. His fourth chapbook, “Many Hats,” will appear in May. 

Sources Consulted:

Cocks, Jay and James Mangold, screenplay, A Complete Unknown, https://deadline.com/2025/01/a-complete-unknown-script-read-the-screenplay-bob-dylan-movie-1236245828/

Klein, Joe, Woody Guthrie: A Life (Random House: NYC, 1980). (great source)

Strasbaugh, John, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues (Harper Collins: NYC, 2013). 

Van Ronk, Dave, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir, with Elijah Wald(Da Capo Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

Wald, Elijah, lecture, “Dylan Goes Electric!: Music, Myth, and History,” American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, March 16, 2016.

Wald, Elijah, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (Harper Collins: NYC, 2015). 

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