Yet Another Side of Bob Dylan

From Protest Singer to Post-partisan American Voice

I. Blowin’ in the Wind

Ireland’s mild, temperate climate produces so many monotonously cloudy and rainy days that a major storm here is a Big Deal—in part because we are so entirely unprepared for it. My father spoke often of Hurricane Debbie, an extratropical cyclone that hit Ireland in September 1961, felling tens of thousands of trees, downing vast swathes of power lines, and entirely destroying many smaller buildings. “We’ll never see anything like it again,” he predicted. But a month ago, Storm Éowyn, another extratropical cyclone, lashed Ireland and the UK. The most powerful storm since 1961, it wrought extensive damage in western and southwestern counties—to the point where, weeks later, tens of thousands of homes still had no electricity, water, or phone signal.

Fortunately, in the part of the country where I live, most essential services were restored within a few days. My biggest challenge following the storm was entertaining my daughter and her best friend, who were suffering, as only teenage girls can, from being cut off from Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram for a whole day, something that had never befallen them before in their short lives. After ascertaining that the local cinema was open and offering warmth, popcorn, and free Internet, I proposed seeing James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet. To my surprise, they eagerly accepted—they knew Chalamet from his lead role in the 2023 musical fantasy Wonka, even if they had heard of Dylan only as a shadowy presence lurking in the mists of musical history.

Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, A Complete Unknown explores a pivotal moment in modern American cultural history, as Dylan transitioned in the mid-1960s from a protest folk singer to a broader, more universal voice, culminating with his controversial electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The Sixties were, like now, a tumultuous time. As such, the movie made me think about how Dylan’s journey, as represented in the film, offers a metaphorical path out of the entrenched polarization that has come to define contemporary America—a path we have been calling post-partisan storytelling.

II. The Times They Are A-Changin’

Several months before Hurricane Debbie battered Ireland back in 1961, an unknown 19-year-old kid from Minnesota visited Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where his idol, Woody Guthrie, then close to 50, lay hospitalized with Huntington’s disease. The teenage Dylan—who later wrote that Guthrie’s songs “had the infinite sweep of humanity in them” and called him “the true voice of the American spirit”—had written a tribute: “Song to Woody.” This is the first song we see Chalamet nervously perform in the film, as a bedridden Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and a curious Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) look on. Thanks to production delays during Covid, Chalamet was able to spend five years preparing for his role as Dylan, during which he not only taught himself to play guitar and harmonica but studied intimately Dylan’s voice, mannerisms, and body language. His performance goes beyond acting and into metamorphosis.

The film follows Dylan’s ascent within the Greenwich Village folk scene, as he hones his craft and finds his voice. His early-60s girlfriend, artist Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the film and portrayed by Elle Fanning of The Great), introduced him to the radical causes of the day, such as civil rights campaigning, anti-war activism, and the anti-nuclear movement. His deeply political music reflected the urgency and idealism of the era—searing, scathing manifestos such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” saw him become the voice of a left-leaning counterculture. And yet the film’s early scenes, while showing Dylan’s commitment to the causes he sang about, also hint at his increasing creative discomfort at becoming a spokesperson for an ideological cause.

The film alludes to—but does not show—Dylan on his 1965 tour of England, the subject of D. A. Pennebaker’s highly acclaimed 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back. In that film, we see Dylan’s youthful intensity, but also his growing discomfort at being asked repeatedly to explain the messages in his songs. “I've got nothing to say about these things I write,” he tells reporters. “There's no great message. Stop asking me to explain.” Dylan was becoming increasingly tired of being the so-called voice of a generation and also wearying of playing his early folk protest material. In the movie, Dylan explodes — “They just want to hear me singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for the rest of my goddamned life!” — and we see him refusing to perform the song on-stage with Joan Baez. Dylan’s real-life disillusionment was perhaps even more dramatic. After playing to a sold-out crowd at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Dylan informed his manager—shortly before his 24th birthday—that he was done with music. Instead of continuing to write and perform, he would move to a cabin in Woodstock, New York, and live a quiet life away from the spotlight of fame.

Dylan followed his American transcendentalist urges for a brief time—he did go to a cabin in Woodstock after returning exhausted from England, but he didn’t stop writing. Don’t Look Back shows Dylan in his suite at the Savoy Hotel, compulsively pecking at his typewriter, constantly creating prose, poetry, and song lyrics. In Woodstock, Dylan took some 10 to 20 pages of this free-form typescript and distilled it down to handwritten verses that became “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan’s lyrics had been moving in a more stream-of-consciousness, imagist direction for some time, but “Like a Rolling Stone,” in its unapologetic loudness, brazenness, and sheer length—at six and a half minutes, it was more than twice the typical length of a 1960s single—marked a defiant new direction, and one the public eagerly embraced. “Like a Rolling Stone” reached number two on the US Billboard charts, behind only the Beatles’ “Help”. In 2014, those handwritten lyrics Dylan scribbled at Woodstock sold at auction for a record $2 million.

A Complete Unknown centers on the “electric Dylan” controversy at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—which in real life took place on 25 July 1965, five days after Columbia Records released “Like a Rolling Stone” as a single. Accounts of the real-life controversy are many and various and often conflicting—but the movie depicts folk traditionalists thoroughly rejecting Dylan’s new sound by booing loudly, throwing objects, and screaming “Judas!” at their former folk hero. On-stage, a defiant Dylan demands that the band play even louder; behind the scenes, his manager brawls with the festival organizer, and a distraught Pete Seeger almost takes a baseball bat to the electrical cabling. This riotous conflict all makes for wonderful cinema—the film is rightfully nominated for eight Oscars—but the movie’s key moment lies not in the chaos but in its aftermath. Dylan makes a final poignant visit to Woody Guthrie’s hospital bed before taking off on his motorcycle on the open road, riding not only into his own future but into an America that embraced him back.

In future decades, Dylan would embrace genres spanning folk, rock, blues, country, and gospel, always reaching toward a broader and more unified American identity. His later work, including Time Out of Mind and Rough and Rowdy Ways, continues this trend toward universal storytelling. By moving away from overtly political youthful stances, Dylan rejected the role of generational spokesperson, instead asserting his identity as an artist.

In doing so, Dylan became an iconic unifying figure in a deeply divided country that was navigating deep conflicts over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and cultural changes tearing at the fabric of American society; many of those controversies continue in some form or another today. But Dylan’s music, particularly in his post-protest phase, offered a way to bridge these divides by celebrating artistic independence and breaking down ideological silos. In a contemporary context, where polarization often seems insurmountable, the film offers a hopeful message: that art and creativity can provide a common ground.

III Shelter from the Storm

A Complete Unknown is more than just a biopic; it is a reflection on the role of art in society and the potential for cultural figures to inspire change. By refusing to be defined by any single label or ideology, the film suggests, we can begin to find common ground and move toward a more genuinely inclusive and unified future.

Watching A Complete Unknown made me reflect on the genre known as the “message movie.” This genre has always existed, of course—directors have often used filmmaking to promote political or social agendas, in ways ranging from the delicately subtle to the outright propagandistic—but message movies started to be more deliberately and systematically produced when eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll founded Participant Productions (later Participant Media) in 2004, launching a new product called “social impact entertainment.”

Participant’s model was simple: It would create or finance films dealing with one or more of six key topic areas—the environment, healthcare, human rights, institutional responsibility, peace and tolerance, and social and economic justice—and then recruit nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups to build impact campaigns around those films. The films would inspire people to action; the advocacy campaign would give them concrete “action items” to complete. Participant’s initial endeavors included Syriana, Fast Food Nation, and An Inconvenient Truth—and the company was objectively successful, producing, co-producing or financing 135 films and winning 18 Academy Awards over its history. However, it shut down in April 2024 after 20 years, laying off nearly all its staff.

Participant makes a fascinating case study for those of us who wish to use story to make the world a better place. Its early accolades dovetail for me with those who applauded Dylan for embedding social and political messages in folk songs to inspire direct action. But we see Dylan in A Complete Unknown rejecting the flatness and one-dimensionality of that artistic model—as well as the limited reach of its audience—and developing a more complex theory of change with a wider reach.

Having studied the creative dynamics and economics of message movies for years, we are pessimistic about whether they actually work at all. Participant struggled to provide more than flimsy evidence that its productions ever changed minds or attitudes—in large part because they never managed to find a way around the classic “preaching to the choir” problem. In other words, most people who went to see Participant films already agreed with the message being promoted, but anyone who disagreed with that message typically stayed away. This created a self-selected audience much like that at the Newport Film Festival.

There are alternatives, and neuroscience points the way. It tells us that we can’t focus our efforts on embedding or spreading social or political messages, which are by definition polarizing, reaching only those who already agree and putting the brains of those opposed on the defensive. If we want to reach people, and bring people together, we need to focus on story in all its multifaceted artistic aspects.

In his Nobel lecture, Dylan reflects on books he read as a child that have stuck with him all his life—notably Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey. He comments that these books “gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.” We believe that, for our writers, reading deeply in such a manner is every bit as important as writing. Understanding the key dynamics of story is more important than being an advocate for a cause. Striving for bold originality—that desire to write material “unlike anything anybody has ever heard”—matters more than formulaic rehearsal, no matter how beautifully done. This is how we strive to navigate our the post-partisan moment.