Bob Dylan is, as I have previously written for Law Liberty, America’s “definitive post-war artist.” The new James Mangold movie, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan in the first part of his career, 1961–65, proves just how important the musician is to American culture.

　　The first time Chalamet’s Dylan talks about himself and fame he suggests one has to be a freak, like in a carnival, certainly, something people can’t look away from. His girlfriend compares him, perhaps unfavorably, to Sinatra, who is not a freak. Sinatra would be the definitive post-war artist if classing up popular music mattered very much, but the American audience is much larger than the suit-wearing class. Another contender for the role may have been Elvis, who was more popular than Dylan, but Elvis is much more a creature of his native South than the Northern cities that gave America mass media and pop culture.

　　Compared to them, Dylan could barely sing—but he could write. He is the natural artistic representative for a democracy dedicated to learning, perhaps even universal access to higher education. Dylan’s fame seems a rebuke to the national love of California, that terrestrial paradise where American history can be forgotten. California seems unintelligible in the America Dylan describes in his music. So while Dylan’s audience looked for social justice in his music, the artist himself was more concerned about justice in the human soul.

　　Rise to Fame

　　Thanks to the disconnect between the artist and his audience, nobody could tell that Dylan was an artist who aimed to help listeners understand themselves, if not also to change their lives. Before he was celebrated, he was a bum, a hobo, a rambler—a man with no respect for the demands of family or work, loyalty, or popular opinion. That made him a criminal to critics or an individual to his admirers.

　　Through his protest songs, Dylan told everyone that he was the conscience of the nation. A Complete Unknown heavily features these, from particularly bad ones like “Masters of War” to particularly good ones like “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” This music built on the combination of sentimentality and desire to punish “The Man” that was present in the folk music of Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy), Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, in a much-applauded performance), and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).

　　A Complete Unknown skips over Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame in his earliest 20s, instead depicting him as a man who just fits the times. While many in the audience may oddly worship the movements of the ‘60s, others may find it difficult to understand how the youth movement Dylan represented took over the country. I propose we consider this movement a case of nationwide madness, the moment when drugs, runaways, riots, and crime broke the confidence of politicians, policemen, and families alike. Dylan is not innocent of the vices of his times, but his motives are not those of his audience or promoters, and only in such a time was there an opening for an artist who lacked charm.

　　Dylan learned from folk music, the blues, and country that the way of life described in that music, lost in the process of modernization, industrialization, and the building up of the world-historical prosperity of the mid-century, could take its revenge—could return as a kind of education of the sentiments of a new generation. American success led to a newly democratic demand to account for the way of life and the character of the American people, a demand that surprised the elites that brought America so successfully through the Second World War and into space, who thought those questions were settled. Artistic sentiment even more than talent replaced meritocracy. Music replaced science, politics, and maybe even religion as the arena of democratic morality and the standard of virtue.

　　What starts out as a matter of saving America from the worst instincts—self-importance—turns out to be a story about Dylan making America work for him.

　　A Complete Unknown dramatizes this social and generational conflict in its plot as the rise of folk music through youth festivals intended to soften the heart, reawaken the conscience, and promote the universal brotherhood of man—and then its replacement by something much more individualistic, in which communists like Seeger, the original hero of the folk movement, had no place. That transformation, from independent to mainstream, a cycle repeated many times in popular music, may have turned the genre away from its roots, but it made sense for an American society increasingly defined by the inability of any institution or leader to say no. Neither can any small scene contain itself, nor can American society defend itself from cultural revolutions. It is precisely Dylan’s promotion of American morality, the call of freedom, that leads him to break with the soft, sentimental conventions of folk and go electric at the Newport Folk Music Festival, and to put behind him the delusion that music can or should attempt to foster peace, love, and understanding in America.

　　The Character of Artists

　　The film is a classic bildungsroman, so it’s not enough to speak about artists in society—it makes us inquire into their private lives as well. Young Dylan dates a very pretty girl named Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) who does all the right things; she’s all about morality, civil rights, higher education, the arts, and it seems culture, too. She says she talks about herself a lot whereas he is silent; eventually, she compares him to a plate spinner and herself to the plate. Self-understanding for her means knowing that the audience is somehow the victim of the artist.

　　Dylan replaces her with Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), an artist, who finds in Dylan the songs that can speak to the desires that she voices in her singing; he criticizes her mediocre songwriting; she falls in love with “Blowin’ in The Wind,” which is not a great song. He understands her better than she understands herself in this regard—she believes that the sentiment she shares with the audience makes the morality of the art, but then she cannot account for the demands of individuality—her pride as an artist and her life apart from do-gooding, for example, her love affair with Dylan.

　　Altogether, Mangold paints Dylan as an unlikable guy, not satisfied with his audience, his fellow artists, or his place in America. I think that gets Dylan’s basic attraction right. Making music is making demands—the audience should change, not in the sense of becoming angelic, but in the sense of understanding their own neediness, which encourages in us the desire to tyrannize artists so that they beautify us. The movie therefore has a much greater purpose than a pretty retelling of Dylan’s early career. It sets out to make a point: although it was necessary for listeners to shamelessly leave behind American proprieties to make Dylan a celebrity, it was also necessary for Dylan to make them unhappy, to weaken their confidence in their own demanding attitude to artists. In this way, he protected himself.

　　In making a spectacle of life rather than living it, in beautifying it, the artist also demands what man is above criticism or what man is not deluded about what truly moves him. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) is the young Dylan’s support in his time of trouble, an artist who lived out the American drama and survived, who recognizes that Dylan is far the more intelligent of the two, but that he needs reassurance that he is not entirely alien. Cash is the only artist whose moral authority allows him to speak directly and confidently, a form of authenticity Dylan seeks in wearing shades.

　　So what starts out as a matter of saving America from the worst instincts—self-importance—turns out to be a story about Dylan making America work for him. His mission is far more selfish than moralistic, but it is useful and reliable for that reason. It is music that does not create fanatics—fans, as we say—but misfits. It’s not only self-defense for artists, but protection for America. For example, it could have saved the country from legions of California hippies.

　　Poetry in America

　　Mangold is nowhere near as good a cinematic artist as Dylan is a musician. His juxtaposition of Dylan’s love songs and his love affairs is maybe the weakest part of the movie; his depiction of the women in Dylan’s life is quite interesting, but he would have had to make much more of it to come up with a satisfying story—some daring would have helped, whereas he seems to feel hemmed in on every side from the glamour of nostalgia to the demands of feminism. It’s even possible he longs for the artistic freedom he shows Dylan acquiring, which would be unhelpful, since it’s a delusion.

　　One is struck that Mangold was not inspired by Dylan’s story to become daring; maybe you can’t teach that. His movie is not going to be remembered, unfortunately—it has too much modesty and its careful avoidance of the sordid side of life doesn’t liberate him to restore Dylan’s standing among people who have for so long taken him for granted as an “elder statesman” of American arts. Mangold’s solution is a comfortable fit for a country whose elites no longer believe in poetry and wouldn’t care for something even alluding to genius. We get mediocrity instead; audiences didn’t make it a popular movie, either.

　　Chalamet has been applauded for his imitation of Dylan, perhaps too enthusiastically. I think he ruined Dune and I don’t think he has succeeded with Dylan, either, because his talent is too tied up with the decay of cinema—Dylan belonged to the moment of ambition, not exhaustion. Our moment is post-artistic, yet a nostalgia for artistic inspiration dominates our elites—the imagination may be exalted, but it lacks content. Moreover, it’s the hardest thing for an actor to do, to persuade us that his character is intelligent—after all, that’s in the plot, not so much in the actor. There, the characterization fails—Dylan is the wordiest of our artists and the one who insisted most on cleverness in his verse, so a movie would have to interpret his ambition, using words to conquer America, and dramatize it. A Complete Unknown doesn’t even attempt that—it’s the politest, least curious invasion of privacy imaginable. Dylan has applauded it publicly, but perhaps he knows he needs the publicity.