Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan biography A Complete Unknown, explained by a super fan

Although he may be known for being an iconoclast, Bob Dylan has a public persona – aloof, aloof, borderline misanthropic – that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the typical Hollywood treatment. That hasn’t stopped the new Dylan biography, A complete unknownfrom trying. Based on the book Dylan goes electric and starring Timothée Chalamet, who does his own live singing and acts as Dylan, the film has taken rave reviews for his achievements. But some critics have had concerns about the film’s many fictitious freedoms as well as the relatively little context we get for the beats of his life – not enough to either satisfy Dylanites or explain what’s going on to Dylan newbs.

Why exactly was it such a big deal when Dylan “went electric” – plugging in his guitar and moving away from the folk music he was making when he started out? What does his musical and personal legacy mean, and why should audiences care?

Fortunately, I found a longtime Dylanhead who was able to fill in many of the gaps for me. Bill DeVillea 40-year veteran of the radio industry, he DJs almost nightly for the Minneapolis public radio station The currentin the city where Dylan first got his early start before heading to New York. DeVille walked me through the context I was missing and waxed rhapsodic about the experience of watching the film as A Dylan Guy. I might be a Dylan fan now through pure osmosis.

Aja Romano: One of the film’s central tensions is this supposed tension between folk and rock. I know it’s part of the long-standing narrative surrounding Bob Dylan, but when you saw the film, did you feel it was an authentic narrative?

Bill DeVille: I think it is. I think his musical love wasn’t necessarily folk right out of the gate. I think it was blues and rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t want to say rock because for me rock is Journey. Rock ‘n’ roll is the real deal. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Buddy Holly – I think that was the music he really loved. He discovered Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and stuff like that and that turned him on to people. Also, he didn’t have a band at the time, so it was easy to go out and just hang out with his acoustic guitar in the coffee houses of New York.

So people were more of a detour for him.

That’s the impression I get. The first concerts he had were under the name Elston Gunn back in the last 50’s. He was playing in Bobby Vee’s band — he was the piano player. He always talked about his love for Little Richardalso. It was his hero, more or as much as Woody, I would imagine.

It sounds as if it was the folk culture, more than the music itself, that took him on his way.

I think there is some truth to that, but you are limited by this timeline. It’s a clever time frame as he rolls out of Minneapolis in 1961 and immediately heads to the Big Apple. In the movie they said he did it solo, but apparently he did it with a friend.

It plays into the tropes the film plays with – a small-town boy goes to the big city, right? Can you set the scene for us in terms of what the actual New York scene was like at the time?

Well, that was the coffee house scene. It was Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger. And Joan Baez was in that scene as well, and Cisco Houston and some of the old folk guys and Dylan—in the movie, it shows him just killing them right out of the gate. And Joan Baez saw something – they saw something special in each other, which was pretty cool to see. It just seems like Bob had a handful of songs he was already working on at the time. Plus he did a lot of covers back then too. The first album came out and it was pretty much all covers except for “Song to Woody”.

The first time I heard that Bob Dylan song, “Song for Woody“, it made me cry. And man, in that movie when it’s performed by Timothée, believe it or not, when he sang the song, it was like, oh my God, this is so good. It sounds so much like Bob. He was very trustworthy.

I think people have been really surprised by the authenticity of that performance. I don’t think it’s something people would have expected from him.

He has gone the extra mile. At the big rollout of the red carpet, he appears as Bob Dylan incognito.

Yes! It was the premiere in New York A complete unknownwhere Chalamet cosplayed Dylan’s infamous 2003 fashion at the Sundance premiere of his then panned film Masked and anonymous.

He wore bangs and a stocking cap and a scarf and leather jacket pulled straight from Dylan. It was hysterical.

He apparently had five and a half years to study the role due to the pandemic and the strike. I don’t know if he’s ever been any kind of musician, but he sings with authenticity and plays harmonica and guitar. All the songs was performed live in the movie, which is also pretty incredible.

That’s the draw. Most people aren’t going to go to this movie and say, “I want to know all about this Pete Seeger dynamic. I want to know all about the Newport Folk Festival.” Most people will come for the music and for them to find that it really shows a level of respect.

Were there any moments that threw you off? Too much fan service? I feel like you need to approach this film with multiple layers of Dylan knowledge.

I might have seen it as a bit too much of a fanboy. I was in love with the movie. Some of the younger generation, I don’t think, got it. But so much of it is based on things that really happened. Like the Newport Folk, when Pete – they didn’t really get into cutting the power too much, but Pete really thought about doing it. He obviously didn’t but he considered it.

That moment – when Edward Norton as Pete Seeger stares pointedly at an ax during Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival – stunned people. And especially when looking at the commentary of the time, historians disagree on whether his decision to play electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was actually the controversial one. When looking at primary sources, some people said they booed because the sound was bad and they just couldn’t hear what was happening. That it wasn’t actually about him playing electric.

I think there was a pretty good round (of controversy). That whole trip in ’65 it seemed especially – as if the person was shouting “Judas!” – that actually happened in (Manchester), England. And they put that in the movie too, even though it happened across the pond, not Newport, Rhode Island.

But I think there was some truth to the idea that people wanted him to be this folk purist. I think it was all a little too precious for Dylan. He just wanted to rock.

Why do you think the film ended on that particular note?

I don’t know, but I think it was important. It could have gone either way. I mean, think about it: Bob could have been this legendary folk musician, purist guy, and he could have been twice as popular as Pete Seeger, but he chose not to. I don’t think he wanted to be limited by the popular. The folk canon is good enough, but Bob had all these songs. He wanted to do it his way. He didn’t want to be manipulated and his way was to play rock ‘n’ roll, I think.

He wasn’t an old guy. He was in his really low 20s when he first started messing around with his acoustic guitar. And the British invasion was also just about to happen. I think he saw that rock ‘n’ roll was what was going on and he wanted to be a part of it. No one wants to be cast or typecast, and he was more than a folk traditionalist.

I think the fact that people didn’t want him to do it made him want to (play rock music) even more. It spurred him on. And he still continued to play some folk songs, so it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. Maybe it was then, but I never experienced it as such a big deal. It was, “there are two kinds of music, good and bad.”

The film places Pete Seeger in the role of mentor doppelgänger, almost. As the film opens, Seeger appears in court charged with contempt of court his conduct before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then we see Dylan meet Guthrie and Seeger at Guthrie’s hospital bed. Although he met both artists soon after his arrival in New York, none of these details are true.

I guess it’s about setting up Pete Seeger as a kind of rebel in his own way. He was like the king at that time. Woody was put up with Huntington’s diseaseso he wasn’t feeling well. I think Woody was more of a mentor to him than Pete was, although the movie doesn’t necessarily show it that way. Obviously he idolized Woody, but in the movie Pete took care of him and he stayed at his house a few different nights.

Pete didn’t really write songs like Bob Dylan did – that wasn’t his thing. He maintained the folk canon. But I think Seeger had a huge admiration for and was kind of a hero to Dylan.

People were a vital form of resistance at the time, so it makes sense that Dylan, character-wise, would be drawn to it.

Yes – and Washington (March 1963) with Joan Baezit was big. But you see in (Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary) No direction home that the press questioned him as if he were some kind of radical, and he really wasn’t very radical.

The film treated Johnny Cash as a giant Easter egg, with Boyd Holbrook playing him as Dylan’s pen pal. What did you think of their relationship?

(Cash) just spurred him on. He loved it. And it’s kind of right, because he took (Dylan) under his wing when he had The Johnny Cash Show back in the late 60s after Dylan made it Nashville Skyline album. I think Johnny Cash had a great, great respect for Bob, and it was mutual. They wrote letters back and forth over the years.

I think that relationship contributed to the film’s commentary on the genre mix. Especially for younger generations coming to see the film – they may not know Dylan that well, but they certainly know Johnny Cash’s many rock covers and other genre mixes, and they bring that context into the film.

Coming into this film for the first time, what do I need to know about Dylan’s legacy and influence?

You should know that he is one of the most important songwriters of all time. I would listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited and Bring it all back home. These are the three albums that are focused on the most in the film.

I couldn’t believe how blown away I was when he sat on the daycare in front of Woody and Pete and he did “Song to Woody”. And you realize the importance and significance of him meeting his hero and how important it was that he found him and was able to play a song for him.

I didn’t really expect that. I was expecting the big moments of the electrified things at the end of the movie, but it was a touching sweet little moment. I was just so captivated after watching it that I just loved the whole experience of watching the movie.

Didn’t strike you as cocky?

It was probably cocky. But I think it took all he had to muster to do it. And he did it.