PETER HITCHENS: God forgive me, I was one of the millions of young men who wanted to be Bob Dylan. Here’s what the new film doesn’t tell you.
Much of the action of the clever and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.
It cleverly evokes the Bohemian, faintly squalid, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of ‘protest’ anthems such as the ghastly, cliched and mindless The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan himself got sick of singing it, and who can blame him?).
But the film misses the true importance of the folk superstar Pete Seeger and of Suze Rotolo, though it spends a lot of time on the way they helped the young Dylan to fame.
Seeger, later famous for his liberal ‘peace’ songs, had at one time belonged to the tiny, ultra-Stalinist US Communist Party.
He wasn’t quite as keen on peace in those days. When most sensible people were very much in favour of fighting the Nazis, in from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been a sort of pacifist.
Worse, he and his folk-group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made a record of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Whoops!
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.
They pulled the record from the shops and went round those who had bought it (fortunately not very many people) asking them to give it back. By 1942 they were banging their drums and twanging their banjos for war.
At UnHerd, David Samuels adds: How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke –he refused to be a Leftist prophet. “In other words, as [James] Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.”
