Thursday, January 02, 2025
I'm still processing "A Complete Unknown", but I certainly enjoyed it. One of the things that I think was notable about it was that it seemed to lean into Dylan's relationships, and the songs that he wrote about them more than his social consciousness, and the songs that social activists thought defined his work in that period. The "protest" material is there, of course- it has to be- but the movie does a nice job of placing that material in context.
As I grope towards my Unified Theory of Bob Dylan one key element for me is that he came on the scene absorbing everything, reflecting on it, then writing about it from his personal perspective. When he saw injustice he wrote about it; when the threat of nuclear annihilation was in the air he wrote about that. But he also wrote about being in love, and being heartbroken, and about being in the world. The movie does a good job of showing us that world, which puts his songs in a context that the various Dylan documentaries, good as the are, sort of miss. Pennebaker, Scorsese and the rest focus on Bob. ""A Complete Unknown", much like "I'm Not There" focus on the context that the young Dylan lived in.
