Take it from me. No musician, maybe no person, has had as much influence on my life as Bob Dylan. He has been threaded through me decade after decade. I believe the gold standard for Bob Dylan movies is Todd Haynes’ masterpiece I’m not There, but what James Mangold is attempting to do here is a different thing. He’s not so much trying to deconstruct who Bob Dylan is but rather to take us back to a moment when he almost lost his entire career by deciding to evolve from a folk hero into well, who he is today – one of the greatest ever.
This trailer shows me anyway that Timothee Chalamet has Bob Dylan well in hand and is likely headed for an Oscar nomination.
Had he remained a folk singer he’d have never written his greatest songs. That’s not to say his folk era wasn’t absolutely brilliant. It was. But the movie is called A Complete Unknown because of one song that remains the greatest rock song of all time.
Martin Scorsese uses the live version of Like a Rolling Stone to great effect in his short film, Life Lessons.
Again, one of the greatest stories ever told on film but one that could NEVER be made today. In my opinion, the film community has become as rigid as the 1950s. This movie would be called “toxic masculinity,” and mansplaining and some such. But it’s true to life. I lived it. I know.
The good news is that we are on the brink of another counterculture revolution that will produce Bob Dylans. But they have to have courage. Courage to face down a crowd that boos you with the strum of your electric guitar.
Art can be dangerous. It can be revolutionary. But that requires courage. In the film Life Lessons, Roseanna Arquette wants to be a great painter like the Nick Nolte character but she isn’t yet. He tells her that you make art because you have to, and it doesn’t matter if you’re good at it. Some of us understand that you must speak the truth because you must, even if it might ruin your career. What guides you is that bonfire burning within that tells you this is the right path. For Bob Dylan it certainly was. But then again, he couldn’t do it any other way. He knew he wasn’t the guy they wanted him to be, so he became the guy he was.
“When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
