Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs

about A Complete Unknown

It seems like the general response to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is mild surprise that the film is not ridiculous, that it succeeds against the odds and the established traditions of schmaltzy biopics to be pleasantly watchable, even for those who are all too familiar with the completely known story of Bob Dylan’s mythologized rise to fame in the early 1960s. I went into it with no expectations of being challenged or learning anything new, and this turned out to be the right approach. As Alison Willmore argued in this review for Vulture, the movie eschews any “hackneyed explanations for why Dylan is the way he is” and “approaches the musician like a force” rather than a “protagonist.” Instead, as Willmore notes, it explores what it must have been like to have some random person show up out of nowhere and start singing fully realized songs for the ages like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A Complete Unknown seems less about Bob Dylan specifically than about the abstract idea of genius and how people recognize and respond to it. “it’s a good movie about talent,” Willmore writes, “and about how it feels to be around someone who has the kind of genius that feels like they’ve been touched by the divine.”

The film takes for granted Dylan’s sacred destiny and mostly trusts that the audience already accepts his world-historical significance. Its complacency about his legacy is part of what makes A Complete Unknown seem like a strange film to make about someone who is still alive and working. You’d be forgiven if, on the basis of seeing this movie and nothing else, you assumed that Dylan had died along time ago, perhaps around 1985, when “the career-spanning retrospective” Biograph came out and sat like a boxed-set tombstone on a career that had tapered off into indifference.