What “A Complete Unknown” tells us about culture in America
“Everyone asks where the songs come from, Sylvie, but when you watch their faces, they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.”
— A Complete Unknown
The culture wants something from its celebrities. At first it seems like adoration. Later you understand it is something hungrier, more ancient. The Aztecs took only hearts. America demands souls. In the case of Bob Dylan, folkies wanted their troubadour; protesters, their anthem-maker; the women… well who knows what they really wanted.
The Sixties are widely treated as something of a standalone decade, a time apart from what came before and after. Just as the popular history of World War II is almost entirely focused on the military history of the conflict, the influence of the Fifties is largely left out of the cultural history of the Sixties. For that matter, the influence of the Forties is also left out of the Fifties. Trying to slice the decades apart is like dissecting a living animal. It’s all one beast, and that beast was the America of the Bretton Woods era. Beginning in 1944, while the war was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, this era saw the world’s money men carving up the globe’s financial soul and chaining it to the dollar, which in turn was tied to gold. This arrangement lasted until the federal government’s deficit spending on the War on Poverty and Vietnam finally led to Nixon unchaining the dollar from gold in 1971, spelling the end of Bretton Woods America. The span of American history from 1944 to 1971 was tumultuous and unsustainable—there were a lot of problems, but cultural stagnation wasn’t one of them.
The explosion of creative energy from the 1950s into the 1960s wasn’t a fluke; it stemmed from a collision of postwar conditions and new technological and economic realities. The GI Bill, suburbanization (e.g., Levittowns), and industrial output fueled a consumer boom, with GDP growth averaging 4% annually. This prosperity created a middle class with disposable income, driving demand for cultural products: records, movies, TVs, and magazines. The spread of television (from 9% of U.S. households in 1950 to 87% by 1960) and radio amplified cultural trends, turning local sounds like rhythm and blues into national phenomena. Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly rode this wave, and Vinyl records and affordable record players massively expanded the universe of music listeners and provided a new kind of revenue stream for musical artists. The postwar baby boom created a massive youth cohort—by 1960, half the U.S. population was under 25. This “teen” demographic, with spending power and leisure time, drove demand for music, fashion, and films that spoke to their identity.
Under the overculture of the post-war Forties and the Fifties was an underculture that would eventually grow and mutate through several iterations before becoming the counterculture of the ‘60s. The counterculture is now viewed as a radical, even revolutionary form of leftism—and that is indeed the direction that many of its adherents went in. But it also contained a strongly reactionary strain of thought and impulse. The antecedent of the counterculture was a melange of conservatives nostalgic for pre-industrial community and urban radicals dreaming of post-industrial utopia. Both shared a deep skepticism toward centralized authority, technological determinism, and mass consumer culture.
It’s for this reason that authors such as John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac—two of Dylan’s major literary inspirations—are often perceived as “leftist” or “crypto-Bolshevik”, despite their work showing a deep affection for American traditions, ideals, institutions, and the American people. It’s clear from Sea of Cortez, East of Eden, or Travels with Charley: In Search of America that Steinbeck simply loved the country too much to want to see it radically changed, whether through communism or capitalism (fundamentally two sides of the same coin: industrial society). As for Kerouac, his 1957 roman à clef On the Road, which became a defining work of the Beat generation and has since endured as one of the most widely popular books among young men, even as it celebrated freedom and adventure, was fundamentally a work of American romanticism, not radical politics. Its protagonists sought transcendence within the American landscape rather than revolutionary transformation of American society.
January 1961 marked the real beginning of the Sixties. That month, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President, and that same month a 19-years-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Some might say the two events were spiritually connected in some way. The world was about to change its tune, and in such times, the troubadours arrive precisely when they are needed. This is where A Complete Unknown begins, with its subject, a “mystery tramp”, emerging one cold morning from the Holland Tunnel with just his guitar and the clothes on his back.
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There is an idea of Bob Dylan: Ray-Ban sunglasses, a Hohner harmonica slung around his neck, a birdlike face framed by wild hair. Dylan’s career spans more than six decades and counting (he’s still out on the Never Ending Tour that began in 1988), but in the imagination of the public Dylan remains forever young: an icon of the Sixties before it got all weird. A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold (who also directed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) and starring Timothée Chalamet as the title character, traces Dylan’s trajectory across these crucial formative years, watching him reconcile himself to his fate as a celebrated artist.
In the film, Dylan arrives in New York only to be told that his intended destination is back in New Jersey, at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, where his musical idol Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy) is battling Huntington’s disease. After finally finding his way to the hospital, he meets both Guthrie and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and performs an original “Song to Woody” that impresses them both. This leads Seeger to take the young musician under his wing and to introduce him to New York City’s folk scene.
New York City’s Greenwich Village features heavily in the film, and for good reason. It was the birth canal of the counterculture, filled with Beat poets and folk singers and activists. The clubs were packed night after night, not just with fans of folk music, but with talent scouts and record label representatives. Mangold emphasizes that Dylan wasn’t launched out of a vacuum—there was a scene with great creative energy and opportunities. And he didn’t go at it alone, he had a solid team. The film introduces the key players who saw his potential early on. Pete Seeger, the folk movement’s elder statesman, serves as mentor, booster, and “vouch.” Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), the shrewd manager, is the business brain behind Dylan’s ascent, a larger-than-life figure—part barracuda, part protector—a sort of Roy Cohn of the music scene.
Bob Dylan’s personal relationships are equally pivotal. Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning), a fictionalized stand-in for Suze Rotolo, is his girlfriend and anchor, who despite being three years younger than him at the time (17) comes off as downright motherly. Joan Baez (played by the lovely Monica Barbaro), brings a different dynamic as Dylan’s lover and duet partner. Barbaro’s Baez is luminous and intense, like a siren, her voice and stage presence a perfect foil to Dylan’s raw edge. Their duets, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” crackle with chemistry. Together, these two figures form a constellation around Dylan, each seeing him as a vessel for their own desires and ambitions.
Through the first part of the film, Dylan largely seems content to just be along for the ride. He dutifully records an album of old folk standards because the record label wouldn’t take a chance on the songs he wrote. He has to be prodded by his girlfriend Sylvie to push ahead with his own songs, but they are still not fully his own. He’s still catering to the tastes of the marketplace: to the folk scene audience. As Dylan’s fame grows, so does his alienation. Everywhere he goes, people recognize him.
One evening it all comes to a head. After attending a party where he is beset by the movers and shakers of the music industry and the overly-familiar glib hangers-on of the scene, Dylan encounters Bob Neuwirth, who invites him to a gig he’s playing at a tavern in the East Village. He ditches his date to attend, but he barely has the chance to enjoy the performance when someone from the audience recognizes him, bringing the show to a halt. Forced to leave, he gets mobbed and even punched in the face on his way out.
Battered and disoriented, Dylan heads to his ex-girlfriend Sylvie’s apartment, despite having already broken up with her. Sylvie is first reluctant to let him in. When she ultimately does, she helps him get cleaned up, and he delivers the pivotal line of the movie: “They’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why they didn’t come to them.” The scene plays out like an attempt to return to a lost Eden—to the life Dylan had before he was marked by fame, like Cain. But it becomes a reckoning with what he’s sacrificed. The presence of another man in his ex-girlfriend’s bedroom underscores that this place is no longer his—just like his life before fame.
Dylan glimpsed what would define the rest of his career: the understanding that true artistic freedom meant disappointing those who wished to claim him. He finds himself at a place of utter loneliness, and there he becomes God’s lonely man. There is a new energy to his work. It’s all him but not him at all. The music doesn’t come from him, it comes to him. It’s the muse singing through him.
His subsequent transformations—going electric at Newport, retreating to Woodstock, his born-again turn—all stem from this pivotal realization that the America that made him would also consume him if he let it. This is ultimately where the film succeeds. It leaves us with the sense that Dylan’s greatest creation wasn’t his music, but his refusal to be known completely—to remain, forever, a complete unknown.
Benjamin Braddock is an American writer and an Editor-at-Large at IM—1776. He can be followed @GraduatedBen.
