A Complete Unknown

I finally watched it, and I have a few thoughts.

April 23rd 2025

My music nerd pal at the bar who is wrong about almost everything was ranting and raving about how he’d hated A Complete Unknown. “Total cliché”, etc. I’d been meaning to watch it, I knew Bob had given it his official approval, I’d seen Chalamet on SNL (really quite good), but this was the kicker.

There’s nothing in it we didn’t already know. Of course Bob was an asshole. Of course he was irresistable. Of course he was mind blowingly brilliant. And prolific doesn’t get close. His output was staggering.

What I had forgotten was how fantastic the early songs were. Somehow, I’d fallen in line with the rock critic lore that it all really started with Bringing It All Back Home, which made Highway 61 Revisited, the masterpiece of that period, possible. I’ve changed my position.

Blowin’ In The Wind
Girl Fron The North Country
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
The Times They Are A-Changin’
All I Really Want to Do
My Back Pages
It Ain’t Me, Babe

All these from 63-4. These are all massive songs. And huge hits. To be clear - these are pop songs. They may be presented in the folk format of the time, but he transcends the format. The melodies a sublime. They soar. They are sing along gold. I’ve had fantastic earworms the last fortnight.

So when the folkies were horrified when they thought he went ‘pop’, what excatly had they been listening to the last two years? Where exactly did they think he was going? They thought he was theirs, but It Ain’t Me, Babe.

We grew up with Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits in the house. I can’t imagine my mother, or my father buying it, but it was there.

These songs were so established by the early 70’s that it was hard to think of them as being the revolution that they were at the time, and I think that might be why I kind of zoned them out of my teenage consciousness. I didn’t really pay attention until my college girlfriend (appropriately older) had Highway 61… then I was all in. But all in to the 65-66 Dylan. And that’s kind of how it stayed until two weeks ago, so I’m thankful to director James Mangold and his cast. So many of us have been enjoying Old Bob, over the last few decades, and rejoicing in his just being Bob, and still, mostly, being great at being Bob. Well, it was very enjoyable to watch him becoming Bob.

And then, of course, disowning Bob, to become Bob.

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PS - I found myself singing Girl From The North Country a couple of days ago and I couldn’t get the line

Many times I’ve often prayed

out of my head.

I think I may have singled out the U2 lyric

In a dry and waterless place

as being a prime example of redundancy, back in the day. Well, this is just as bad, if you want to be that guy.

I don’t. Maybe I’m mellowing in my old age but Bob gets away with it because he’s Bob. You just know that he’s not spending more than a couple of nights refining a song before he’s on to the next one. How could he have written so many if he’d been meticulous like Cohen?

And to be fair, U2 got away with it because they were U2.

It’s the singer, not the song.

Or something like that.

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