PAW Goes to the Movies: Professor Sean Wilentz Watches ‘A Complete Unknown’

Bob Dylan only played three songs backed by electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but that set has been called a transformative moment in modern music, dissected in books, articles, and seemingly endless debate. Now it is the subject of a feature film, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan, Edward Norton as his mentor, Pete Seeger, and Monica Barbaro as folk singer Joan Baez. The film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress.

Who better to review A Complete Unknown for the latest installment of PAW Goes to the Movies than Sean Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History? Bob Dylan has earned 38 Grammy nominations during his long career (not to mention the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature). Wilentz has two Grammy nominations, receiving the first in 2005 for his liner notes on a recording of Dylan’s 1964 concert at Philharmonic Hall. In addition to numerous works on American political history, he is also the author of the 2010 book Bob Dylan in America and is currently working on another project about Dylan’s early career, which will be released later this year.

Ties to Dylan are also somewhat personal for Wilentz. He attended that 1964 Philharmonic Hall concert as a teenager, and his family owned a Greenwich Village bookshop that was frequented by Dylan and other folk musicians. Wilentz has written that Dylan first met poet Allen Ginsberg in his uncle’s apartment above the bookstore in 1963.

Wilentz recently went to see the film with PAW senior writer Mark F. Bernstein ’83, and the two discussed it afterwards.

What did the filmmakers get right?

The spirit. The scenes I liked best were almost parables of the story of Dylan’s development and how he fit in the Greenwich Village scene. There’s a scene toward the middle of the movie when Bob Neuwirth, an artist and folk singer who’s going to become a sidekick of Dylan’s, shows up and from that moment on, when Dylan first starts playing the electric stuff, I was smiling, and my feet were tapping.

How accurate was it?

The facts are all true, the songs are all true. But none of it happened the way that the film depicts it. Dylan didn’t come to Greenwich Village in 1961 with “Girl From the North Country” ready to go. It’s not a criticism, but one of the things the film couldn’t capture was his development from the time he arrived in New York to, say, 1963 or so. He wasn’t that great when he arrived. He was OK, but he learned a lot. It was that learning process that’s missing.

Did they make any other big mistakes?

I think both the writers and Chalamet portrayed Dylan from the get-go as a somber genius. That wasn’t Bob Dylan at all. Dylan, when he hit the Village, was jittery. His foot would be jiggling all the time. He had this intense energy, and that doesn’t come across. And he was also very funny, very witty. He still is.

The biggest mistake, for me, was the way they depicted Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York, although the character, played by Elle Fanning, is called Sylvia in the movie. I knew Suze, and she was nothing like the Sylvia character. The filmmakers made Sylvia out to be a kind of a dilettante, but Suze was a serious artist, and she introduced Dylan to a great deal about poetry and painting, as well as politics.

Dylan’s electric set at Newport has been very controversial, but what was its real significance?

I think it was an extension of what he was doing musically, rather than a break with it. The movie, as well as Elijah Wald’s 2015 book on which it is based (Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties), sets up a kind of uneasy connection between Dylan and Pete Seeger, who was one of the leaders of the folk revival. Seeger is a left-wing political and musical purist, and Dylan wants nothing to do with that. But Dylan was part of the folk revival, and he was moved by the early Civil Rights Movement. He wrote those early songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” absolutely sincerely. But then the whole form became confining.

The very first song he sang at Newport was “Maggie’s Farm.” That is based on an old song called “Down on Penny’s Farm,” done by the Bentley Boys in the 1920s. And Dylan had already turned it into another song called “Hard Times in New York.” And then he transformed it again into “Maggie’s Farm,” except this time with Mike Bloomfield, a great blues player, on guitar. One of the things Dylan does so beautifully is to take a tradition, reinvent it, and take it somewhere else.

I liked the invented last scene, where Dylan goes out to see Woody Guthrie in a hospital in New Jersey. Earlier in the movie, Guthrie had given Dylan his harmonica and Dylan decides to keep it. And as the credits roll, we see him riding off on his motorcycle. That scene is significant not only in what it says about Guthrie as Dylan’s mentor, but also because it says that Dylan is not going to renounce what he had done as a folk musician, even though he was moving on artistically. That’s the difference between an ideologue and an artist. Ideologues renounce things. Artists absorb things and use everything at their disposal to create.

Seeger and the other older white folk singers come across as stodgy reactionaries. Is that fair?

Someone asked me recently, why did people get upset about Dylan playing electric music when Johnny Cash and Muddy Waters were already playing electric? That’s because there was this compartmentalization. If you were some white Southerner, you could go ahead and play electrified country music. If you were a Black man from Mississippi who has gone to Chicago, sure. But if you’re the embodiment of a movement that cherished its purity, its authenticity, and its connection to the “folk” — aka proletariat — you couldn’t. So, there was this compartmentalization that I think was subtly hierarchical. Even though Seeger and the other folkies were great fighters for civil rights, and championed Black artists, a certain patronizing view of other musicians and other traditions crept in. Dylan’s genius was that he blew all that apart.

What is Dylan’s influence on American music?

He put intelligent poetry into pop music. There were forms of poetry before him; I mean, Cole Porter had more than a touch of a poet. I’m not putting those people down. But Dylan introduced modernist poetry and other lyrical forms, including traditional folk balladry, that were practically unheard of in popular music before him. He knows every inch of American music and has managed to take it into places it had never been before.

Interview conducted and condensed by M.F.B.