Context and a Movie: A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan: [singing] The answer is blowing in the wind.

Brian Lehrer: No, that's not the Brian Lehrer show theme. We now resurrect a series we've done occasionally called Context and a Movie. It's where we convene a conversation about a new film with both a movie critic and an expert in the subject matter. This time we examine A Complete Unknown, the newest biopic about Bob Dylan and his early years in the folk music scene. That wasn't the Dylan original, that was from the movie. Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez singing that duet that we just sampled from.

Joining us for this context in a movie conversation are Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic of the New York Times and Stephen Petrus, Director of Public History Programs at LaGuardia and Wagner Archive. Stephen is also the co-author of the book Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival, which came out in 2015. Alissa, welcome. Stephen, welcome back to WNYC. Hi there.

Stephen Petrus: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Allisa Wilkinson: Yes, thanks for having me here, too.

Brian Lehrer: And Alissa, I want everybody to know that you didn't just write a review of A Complete Unknown. You went back and watched like 15 films that had anything to do with Bob Dylan.

Allisa Wilkinson: I did.

Brian Lehrer: What did you learn? Were there big patterns that you can start off with?

Allisa Wilkinson: Yes, there were, actually. I didn't totally know what to expect. I'd seen a bunch of the movies and some of them are really well known, like, Don't Look Back is a national treasure of a documentary. It's one of the most important films in American history, and it follows Dylan on one of his very early tours in the UK. You start to spot a pattern because Dylan, of course, is a shape shifter and the movies have shape shifted along with him.

There's early documentaries that often capture his rise and then the moment when he went electric and then everything that happened after that, and then there's this long middle period where he was kind of trying to be a Hollywood guy and is in a bunch of movies that are conventional movies about a romance or a western. Then we move into an era where it feels like people are trying to figure out, "What does Bob Dylan mean? Who is he?" That, I think starts with Todd Haynes's movie, I'm Not There, from 2007, which is a really incredible movie that's sort of a biopic, but six different actors play Dylan.

There's a little bit of him in a Coen Brothers movie, and then Scorsese starts making some kind of playfully half true, half fiction movies, and then, of course, we have the new one. You can see this change in the eras of Dylan on film as you as you follow those.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen, would you introduce yourself a little to our listeners and talk about your work as a historian of the folk music scene and where you see this new Dylan biopic fitting in?

Stephen Petrus: Yes, Brian, I am co-author of the book Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival, and I devote a chapter to Dylan during this era, from about 1961 to 1965, his immersion emergence in the Greenwich Village folk music scene and his transformation and ultimately his performance at Newport in 1965. I've done a lot of research on Dylan and the Village and Newport, and I think the film is brilliant.

I think, to me, the strength is the music, the performance by Timothee Chalamet. He learned Dylan's extensive repertoire from 1961 to 1965, sang it beautifully. There are many historical inaccuracies in the film, but to me, I didn't mind. I won't quibble with them. I think it's an instance where many of the facts are wrong, but the film is right. That's because the director, James Mangold, really captures the spirit of the individual performers, not just Dylan, but Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie. I think it's a wonderful film, but there are different ways of understanding Dylan's rise to stardom during this era.

Brian Lehrer: Such as?

Stephen Petrus: Well, for one thing, I think we have to think of Dylan as an apprentice from around 1961 to 1963. Remember when he arrived in New York, he was just 19 years old, and he wasn't a teenage prodigy. He was a college dropout from the University of Minnesota, and he entered the Greenwich Village folk music scene and he was very much mentored, tutored by the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Paul Clayton, Terri Thal. Peter, Paul and Mary recorded and performed the song Blowin' in the Wind, made it a national hit.

You don't really get a sense of this in the film. To me, my concern is I don't want viewers to come away thinking that he was a solitary genius, as if he had a conversation with God and wrote Blowin' in the Wind. He was very much part of a scene that valued instruction, apprenticeship. Think of Dylan as a sponge, like a blotting paper, soaking up so many different influences. That's how I portray Dylan myself in my book Folk City.

Brian Lehrer: Alissa, Stephens says that some of the facts in the movie are wrong, but as you write, like all the best Dylan movies, A Complete Unknown has one thing to say about him. You can't know Dylan as Dylan. You just know whatever he decides to be that day. I'm going to play a clip from our own WNYC archives, and then I want to get your take on it as someone who's very aware that Dylan just makes stuff up about his life, depending on the context.

Dylan was on the WNYC program, which was a folk music program with the host Oscar Brand in 1961. We're going to hear this one-minute clip of Oscar Brand interviewing Bob Dylan on WNYC. Alissa, I'm going to ask you and Stephen, I'll ask you how much of this is BS? Here we go.

Oscar Brand: Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota, but, Bob, you weren't raised in Duluth, were you?

Bob Dylan: I was raised in Gallup, New Mexico.

Oscar Brand: Did you get many songs there?

Bob Dylan: Got a lot of cowboy songs there, Indian songs, carnival songs, type vaudeville kind of stuff.

Oscar Brand: Now, where'd you get your carnival songs from?

Bob Dylan: People in the carnival.

Oscar Brand: Would you travel with it or did you watch the carnival?

Bob Dylan: I travel with the carnival when I was about 13 years old.

Oscar Brand: For how long?

Bob Dylan: For all the way up till I was 19. Every year, off and on, I joined different carnivals.

[MUSIC - Bob Dylan: Sally girl]

Well, I'm gonna get you, Sally girl

I'm gonna get you, Sally girl

I'm gonna get you, Sally girl

I'm gonna get you, Sally girl.

Brian Lehrer: All right, we'll have to fade down the good part here. Singing and playing the harmonica. Was he really a carney?

Allisa Wilkinson: No, but also there's this interesting facts and then the greater feeling there. He definitely has absorbed and picked up music from all kinds of different places. The fact that he wasn't a carny doesn't negate the fact that he could write those cowboy songs and he could write those carnival songs. One of the movies I got to watch, which I think is one of the better ones where he appears as an actor, is Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which is a Sam Peckinpah movie that he appears in briefly, but he also wrote the soundtrack for the whole thing. It was nominated for major awards, and you would never believe this guy hadn't spent a lot of time just bumping around on the prairie.

I think that what's been pointed out is that he apprenticed with a lot of people who were drawing on all kinds of influences. That's what American folk music has always been. You can really read his career through that lens, and you can also see him trying on all these different hats and all these different identities as a kind of a writer who later would end up winning a Nobel Prize for his lyrics because he was so good at channeling different kinds of people and different kinds of experiences that make up America.

Brian Lehrer: You want to keep going on that theme, Stephen?

Stephen Petrus: Yes, the interview was complete BS, but on the other hand, I think we all reinvent ourselves, and the very promise of New York is personal renewal. Dylan arrives here in 1961, and his identity was fluid and malleable. I really like the line in the film, Brian, where he's talking to Sylvie Russo, who is really Susie Rotolo, and said, "Oh, people forget their past," or people make up their past.

As a historian, when I do oral history interviews, I see that people tend to emphasize the good in their past and omit or downplay their shortcomings or their weaknesses or their flaws. Of course, Dylan took it to an extreme, but I see many of us reinventing ourselves. In the city of New York, 1961 people coming from suburbia, escaping the stifling constraints and looking to enjoy a rich intellectual and culture in the city, or African Americans fleeing racial segregation and violence in the South, looking to reinvent themselves. The context is different, for sure, but I get it. I think it's pretty hilarious listening to some of these old interviews.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a clip from the movie along those lines. The clip that we just played with Oscar Brand on WNYC was from real life. This is the Dylan character being interviewed by-- or in conversation with the Joan Baez character. Another minute clip, this time from the film.

Joan Baez: Who taught you to play?

Bob Dylan: Well, I taught myself, really. Picked up a few books at the carnival.

Joan Baez: At the carnival?

Bob Dylan: Well, yes. They would sing, cowboys would come through, teach me all sorts of funny chords. They passed through in the shows in Kansas or Dakotas. Yes, these chords I learned from a cowboy named Wigglefoot.

Joan Baez: You were in a carnival? You are so completely full of-- I had lessons as a kid, normal lessons. I write, too. I'm not sure there's a way to learn that.

Bob Dylan: Too hard.

Joan Baez: Excuse me?

Bob Dylan: You tried too hard to write.

Joan Baez: Really?

Bob Dylan: Yes. If you're asking.

Joan Baez: I wasn't.

Bob Dylan: Sunsets and seagulls, smell of buttercups. Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist's office.

Joan Baez: You're kind of an [inaudible 00:11:28] Bob.

Bob Dylan: Yes, I guess.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I guess. Chalamet is Dylan, Barbaro is Baez. Alissa, you did a deep dive into their artistic relationship. What did you learn?

Allisa Wilkinson: It's such an interesting relationship because they were on the scene together. She was a much more established artist. As someone who's not a Dylanologist, all of this is interesting to watch. I think, in the films they will reunite later for Renaldo and Clara, a film that Dylan made with his wife, but also Joan Baez is in it, and they toured together repeatedly. That's a kind of interesting, fruitful relationship.

I love how it's depicted in the film. I think Monica Barbaro is pretty amazing in this movie, but it was like a very-- It's always interesting to me to see two artists who are incredibly talented on their own kind of feeding off of each other, and it's even more when there's this kind of personal tension between them. You can see this pop up in the documentaries as well, that cover the tours, including the Rolling Thunder ones. It's sort of one of those-- maybe partnership is a little too far, but it's definitely one of those artistic relationships that matters a lot to how music developed over time in that field.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call from a listener. He says he grew up listening to Bob Dylan music. Joe in New Hyde Park, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joe.

Joe: Yes, hi, Brian, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, thanks. What you got?

Joe: Anyway, I was listening to your conversation about Bob Dylan. I'm a Vietnam veteran, and so we listened to him a lot, even when we were in Vietnam. [unintelligible 00:13:29] Dylan more of a prelude to the rap things we have today. More of a poetic type music that he was trying to develop. I think it was more, to me, anyway, more of a message. It wasn't a talent in his voice, but it's what he said, because words do matter.

You'd listen to him and you'd get what's going on in the world and what's going on around us, things like that. That's kind of like how I viewed it anyway. This was a prelude, this was poetic in many senses. When you listen to him-- I remember when I was in Vietnam and there were some bad times at points, and when I would listen to him when I had time, it was a calming message that was coming. It wasn't so much a protest song, although some of his songs were protests to the war, but in a message way. I think most people in my generation probably got it at home.

Brian Lehrer: Joe, thank you. Wonderful call. Stephen, for you, as a folk music historian, what do you think about Joe's connecting the lyrics orientation, the poetry orientation of Dylan music to the rap music of today? Also worth worth noting, Bob Dylan won his Nobel Prize for literature.

Stephen Petrus: That's right. Many people were like Joe, especially in 1963 and 1964 when Dylan released Freewheelin' and The Times They Are a-Changin', speaking about messages, political messages, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit. He wrote topical songs in support of civil rights activism. This is something we see in the film, too. We see Pete Seeger with his great hopes and expectations that Dylan would become the next Woody Guthrie, only to be dashed by 1964 and 1965 as Dylan was shifting away from politics.

The resonance of Dylan's music was deep and extensive. Joe, I appreciate your call and you know, as a Vietnam veteran, what his lyrics meant to you.

Brian Lehrer: Alissa, as we start to run out of time, just picking up that theme the movie culminates with Dylan shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric. One of your colleagues at the Times writes, "It was a seismic music event." I don't know. For you, did you like it? You're a movie reviewer. It's gotten mixed reviews.

Allisa Wilkinson: I loved how that moment was portrayed in the film. I think there's a moment where Timothee Chalamet smirks that I think is just fantastic. It conveys a lot to you. I'm 41. I'm an older millennial, and so we think about authenticity in music crossed with the pop era that I grew up in. It's so interesting to see Dylan doing something that upsets so many people and then to think about whether there's an artist who could do that today.

I thought of Beyoncé doing country or Taylor Swift moving from country to pop, and just thinking about all the ways that people thought about music differently in the folk scene than they might today, and how maybe Dylan is the forerunner of a lot of the shape shifting pop musicians that we're used to.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen, a last word on that theme.

Stephen Petrus: Yes. The 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the controversy of playing electric instruments. In fact, it's a little difficult to discern just how much booing there was. Remember, there were 17,000 people in the audience that evening. Sure, some were booing, some were cheering. The issue was the amps on stage were turned up, the microphones were turned down, so the records that we have of that evening, they don't really capture the audience's response.

Also, there was poor sound quality. The shortness of the set might be a factor in terms of people booing, but it's become mythologized and I thought it was presented wonderfully and in such a dynamic way.

Brian Lehrer: There we have a context and a movie segment about A Complete Unknown about Bob Dylan. We thank Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic at the New York Times and Stephen Petrus, Director of Public History Programs at the LaGuardia & Wagner Archives and co-author of the book Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. This was really fun. Thank you both so much.

Stephen Petrus: Thank you, Brian.

Allisa Wilkinson: Thank you.

 

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