I am very on the fence about whether or not James Mangold’s newest Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown (2024), is a political movie or not. Let me explain why.

Is the film suffused with activism or devoid of it? Copyright: Searchlight Pictures © All Rights Reserved. Photo: IMDb.

Following the box-office hits of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), and Rocketman (2019), the musical biopics train has only been gaining speed and traction. James Mangold’s depiction of Bob Dylan is the latest link in this chain. Dylan himself was an executive producer on the film, yet the film is “far more conventional than either [the previous Todd Haynes directed biopic] I’m Not There or Dylan himself”. The previous, much more experimental I’m Not There (2007), where Dylan is portrayed through six different narratives, played by six different actors, is a far reach from the cookie-cutter standard “Man vs Society” story of A Complete Unknown. One way of explaining the discrepancy between these two portrayals is that Todd Haynes tried to encapsulate the person, Bob Dylan, while James Mangold was more interested in the broader theme of fame. He even admitted that Milos Forman’s 1984 movie about Mozart, Amadeus, “a film about genius and the way all of us react to genius”, was an inspiration for his take on Dylan.

“Dylan”, the phenomenon

Thus the film, with its focus on characters like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, becomes much more “about Dylan the phenomenon than Dylan the man”. A Complete Unknown explains Bob Dylan’s role in American culture’s canon through the stark image of a specific historic event – the Newport Folk Festival performance in 1965 – a turn that impacted music, activism, and literature – narrowing the narrative on what rising to fame, and rebelling against it, looks like. It establishes the premises of Dylan’s fame yet does so in a way that may seem too clear-cut for such a complex and constantly evolving artist.

Martin Luther King on the March on Washington in 1963. Copyright / Photo: MLKOnline.

Omissions from the film
One of the larger omissions in this biopic that I must comment on is the ways in which the women are portrayed. Bob’s first wife Sara Lownds, now Sara Dylan, was a fundamental part of Dylan’s life at this moment in time, often the inspiration for his songs, yet is entirely excluded from the narrative. Even Suze Rotolo, represented by the character Sylvie and played by Elle Fanning, is largely reduced to a “doormat character”. More truthfully, she had a big influence both on Dylan’s style and on his political charge. She was, for example, the one who introduced him to the poet Arthur Rimbaud and Dylan only started addressing issues such as the threat of nuclear war after meeting Rotolo, who worked as a political activist and with the anti-nuclear group SANE.

The march on Washington
A moment that is also brushed past in the film is Dylan’s performance at the March on Washington in 1963 – which occurred in reality on the same stage, only moments before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was an event that Seeger had introduced Dylan to, and one that Baez also performed at – meaning it would have fit in well with the main narratives of A Complete Unknown. The historical performance has been highly debated in many ways, not least for the song choice of “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, which highlighted the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers and critiqued institutional racism, seemingly ridding the assassin of excessive blame. Still, it was a very important part of his career as a folk protest singer and could have been used as a larger plot point to show Dylan’s despair at shouldering a movement that he knew he shouldn’t head.

The failure of The 1965 Newport Folk Festival
The climax of the film is the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, with Dylan, most importantly, “going electric”, ie. playing his new original song “Maggie’s Farm” with an electric guitar. Worth noting is that the song choice is as trail-blazing as the style – it actively fights for civil justice while breaking with old ways, showing too Dylan’s struggle with activism and fame: “Well, I try my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them / They say sing while you slave / I just get bored / I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm, no more”. This is Dylan taking his protest voice in a new direction, and it is openly booed and critiqued. The film does do the outroar justice in its depiction, but I believe it fails to establish the ways in which Society, as an antagonist, was specifically politically charged at this time.

The portrayal of the catastrophic failure of 1965, while being an incredibly powerful performance by Timothée Chalamet, doesn’t illustrate the ways in which Dylan was breaking not only with the expectations of a music genre, but also with the conformity of how to be an activist and how to galvanize people into action, when he “went electric”.

Not political?
The disruption at Newport is so iconic because it is Dylan saying what he’s also stated in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” – “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”. In this he is declaring what conflict he has with being a head figure in the civil rights movement and the voice of a generation. Most importantly, he’s got a tripartite audience to this announcement; he’s saying it to those who want his activism to be a specific way, to those who want him to be the humorous and surreal Bob Dylan, and to those who don’t want him to stray from traditional folk music.

A weak ending
The film wonderfully captures how the artist unshackled himself from the frozen persona that had been created around him but is vague in its portrayal of the social ricocheting that this stood for and led to. Bob Dylan has notably throughout his career gone through several iterations in trying to navigate the balance between authenticity and representation, both as a celebrity and consequently as an activist. He has never, however, claimed to be, not even in those early folk moments, a spokesperson for anyone other than himself. I understand the choice to keep his politics in the shadows of the film, but in my opinion, it makes for a weaker ending. Therefore, I think it is a shame that this last dialogue between Bob and Pete (Seeger) was in the end cut:

“— [The album The Times They Are a-Changin’] is a rocket into deep space.
— What’s wrong with that?
— People look small from space.
— People are small, Pete.”

Timothée Chalamet (playing Bob Dylan) on location filming with director James Mangold. Copyright: Searchlight Pictures © All Rights Reserved. Photo: IMDb.

People are small, and so is Bob. His persona has been ballooned and glorified with fame, but he is trying to pull them all forward, into real time, into the future. The Times They Are a-Changin', Dylan’s third album, released in 1964, is the first to consist only of originals, and is highly social and political, interacting with issues such as racism and poverty, both important in the ‘60s. An attempt to downplay this album as simply Dylan going in a new creative direction, one which studio executives and Dylan’s mentor Peter Seeger didn’t like, is to sell it incredibly short. The album was a marriage between the civil rights movement and the folk music movement. It is an album in which Dylan both bends his will, applying himself as a spokesperson, while testing the creative boundaries that would eventually lead to him going electric.

Or is a new folk musical directions inherently political?
In the beginning of the film, Dylan’s originals aren’t encouraged, since a newcomer to folk music is expected to respect the “Shakespeares” of the genre. Sylvie [Suze Rotolo] however argues that all old songs were new once, and in the same breath comments on the civil unrest in the South. To suspend the folk music genre in time, it’s implied, is to keep it in the past – going against its core principle as a genre of revolution.

A 2025 poster for the film. Copyright: Searchlight Pictures © All Rights Reserved. Photo: IMDb.

The pressing question that wouldn’t leave me after watching the film was exactly this: is the film suffused with activism or devoid of it? Is it a bland blanket story — cleaning up the complex start of an even more complex career? Or is folk music a genre so inherently political that it doesn’t need more attention drawn to it? Or, the secret third option, is this a story that shows rebellion on several planes and wishes to engage a new generation with Bob Dylan?

A symbol for America in the mid-20th century
The larger issues, nuclear threats and the civil rights movement, hover in the shadows of the film. These shadows are the short clips we get of Dylan playing at the March on Washington, or Joan Baez running panicked through the street following Cronkite’s speech on the nuclear threat. The film is subtle in the ways it evokes issues in which Bob Dylan played an active role later.

At the same time, one may of course argue that the film doesn’t keep politics in the shadows. In capturing this flashbulb moment, the story sketches out larger narratives. In loudly celebrating American achievement, with for example Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land is Your Land” and the moon landing, the film can be thought to, synecdochically, represent America in the mid-20th century. Choosing to focus on Dylan going electric means choosing to show a shift away from traditional folk music, which in its early stages focused on cultural, religious and national identities. The film does notably begin with Peter Seeger on trial for Guthrie’s “un-American” song – meaning that the genre was already expanding, and already upsetting people. What made Dylan’s break so much more damaging is that he wanted to expand the scope of his audience’s own, often American, blue-collar, and Christian, identities. The issue then rests with whether or not this is a too mythologized period, both in Dylan’s career (as Dylanologists Lucy Sante and Ian Grant discuss) or in America’s history to try to capture.

The third option: story as an activist tool
Some solace can, however, undoubtedly be found in the narrative. Perhaps the intention of the filmmakers was to pique a new audience’s interest in Dylan, urging them to discover him and his advocacy on their own, guided and inspired by the introductory story. Thus, the revival of his spirit would becomes more important than the revival of his politics. Ergo, the fact that new generations understand that we ought to be exactly “what they don’t want us to be” becomes more important than a complete lecturing about the political intricacies of 1965. The role of pop stars in politics has changed drastically, but the director James Mangold still considers art capable of impacting social change: “people no longer trust information, but at least metaphor, emotion and imagination may still have a way, since it exists in a place that already is known to be not exactly factual”.

More than one way to play a song
All in all, I can’t tell if this film purposefully skirts politics in order to let the music do the talking or lacks attention to what a socially seismic shift the performance was, not just in the world of music. I am on the fence, and swayed, quite subjectively, by the performances of the cast, whose glances, electricity, and outbursts, show that this is clearly the story of a beginning and may serve many purposes. In several ways, what Mangold does best in his depiction of Dylan, is the refusal to show little else than the evolution of his music and Dylan’s milieu. By showing how fame compresses, simplifies, and ignores a celebrity – we as the audience are barely any smarter about who Bob Dylan was or what really went on in his head – but we understand a fraction of what the shock of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival meant. It was Dylan’s first break away from the expectations of him as a folk activist singer – it was a goodbye and a “fuck you”, a refusal to be a stranger to himself, crushed under the weight of everyone else – and thus what elevated him from great to iconic. The final conversation between Bob and Pete which was kept in the film captures perhaps this ambiguity best: “There’s more in this world to sing about than justice, Pete. And there’s more than one way to play a song.”

‘A Complete Unknown’: Bob Dylan’s Activism Watered Down or Revitalised?