‘A Complete Unknown’ has Dylan-mania sweeping the country — is that a good thing?
Some longtime fans bristle as legions of new fans embrace a Hollywood version of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest poet
Bob Dylan, cicra 1982. Photo by Getty Images
In the wake of the Oscar-nominated biopic, A Complete Unknown — up for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Timothée Chalamet’s performance as the young Bob Dylan — the Nobel Prize-winning 83-year-old folk-rock poet is not only enjoying a late-career bounce, he may well be witnessing the greatest mainstream popularity of his six-decades-long career.
Widely considered the greatest and most influential songwriter of the rock era, Dylan has long been held in the greatest esteem by many fellow artists and dedicated fans. But in spite of all the awards, honors and critical acclaim he has garnered over the course of his 63-year career as a recording and performing artist, Dylan has always been something of an acquired taste for mainstream pop music listeners who may know and enjoy his work best through the hit cover versions of his songs by the likes of Joan Baez, Peter Paul & Mary, and the Byrds — versions that tend to smooth over some of his more abrasive qualities. To this day, some just cannot abide the sound of his voice. And many today — as they have since the 1970s — view Dylan as a relic of the 60s, when he was rightly or wrongly deemed to be “the voice of a generation.”
But all that seems to be a-changin’ now that Timothée Chalamet — beloved among a new generation of moviegoers — has reintroduced the world to Bob Dylan through the film, which is chockful of Chalamet’s live performances of early Dylan songs, from “Song to Woody,” addressed to Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie, through his signature hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Dylan’s newfound popularity can be measured in several ways. A handful of his early albums and greatest-hits compilations have re-entered the pop charts in the U.S. and U.K., including 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited, 1967’s Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, and The Essential Bob Dylan compilation from 2000, all of which have reappeared in the Top 20. In England, “Like a Rolling Stone” recently returned to the singles chart for the first time since it was originally released in 1965. And the movie’s soundtrack album, mostly featuring Chalamet but also including performances by Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, peaked at #3 in the U.K. and is already in the Top 50 in the U.S., where it won’t even be released on CD until February 28.
After Chalamet performed “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” on Saturday Night Live, the obscure Dylan tune — written in 1962 but only first released on the 1971 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II compilation (five years after Elvis Presley released his version of the tune) — cracked the Top 30 on iTunes.
When Dylan’s fall-winter 2024 tour came to its conclusion, many thought the curtain may have finally come down on the road warrior’s Never Ending Tour, which has seen Dylan relentlessly perform approximately 100 concerts each year since 1988. But in the last week or two, over 50 new concert dates have been announced for this year, running from March through September, undoubtedly in part due to his newfound popularity.
The bounce provided by A Complete Unknown even extends beyond newfound interest in Dylan. When tickets for the 2025 Newport Folk Festival went on sale a few weeks ago, they reportedly sold out in less than one minute, despite the fact that not a single performer had been announced for this summer’s festival. (Alas, Dylan won’t be one of them; he is already booked to play concerts in Georgia and North Carolina that weekend. How great would it have been to have Dylan reprise his historic 1965 Newport set in toto?)
Not to be churlish or begrudge Dylan this surge of popularity in the twilight of his career, but some may wonder if there is something a little bit off, a little bit gnarly, about Dylan getting this late-career boost due to a Hollywood retelling of his early musical evolution featuring a much-lauded impersonation of him by a matinee idol. In other words, should we feel good that it took Timothée Chalamet to open the eyes and ears of a new generation — or, arguably, several generations — to the magic of rock music’s greatest poet, the one who helped pave the way for the Beatles to shed their teenybopper approach in favor of a much more serious focus on songwriting and experimentation?
I am already on record as one of the very few Dylan fans and experts who did not like A Complete Unknown nor Chalamet’s performance, which I reviewed in these pages. So instead of repeating my criticisms of the film, I asked a number of fellow Dylanologists how they felt about their hero attaining new heights of popularity not through anything he himself has done, but due to a Hollywoodized representation of the enigmatic bard from Hibbing, Minn.
“I’m delighted by this upsurge of interest, though somehow the power of a film’s pre-release promotion of itself astonished me as much as its upshot as regards Bob,” said the British writer Michael Gray, the author of numerous books on Dylan, who is widely regarded as the pioneer of Dylan studies. “I feel pleased that the young Bob can still communicate his energy, stylishness and cool — as well as its flashes of radical politics — at a time when they’ve never been more needed in the USA. Obviously as a critic who hailed his artistic importance many decades ago, I’m glad to see renewed signs of its apparent timelessness.”
Author and singer-songwriter Howard Fishman says, “I just think it’s great that Dylan has re-entered the cultural conversation in this way while he’s still around, doing what he does. I’ve heard from people who really didn’t know much about him, who have become fans now that they’ve seen the film. I have no doubt that Dylan’s upcoming concerts will attract any number of people that have never seen him perform in person before, and that those will be positively baffling experiences for them. That’s a very good thing. As a creative force, Dylan has always represented something wild and subversive about the American spirit, and we need that right now more than ever.”
Allison Rapp, assistant editor at Ultimate Classic Rock, says, “I’m glad to be here for this revival of sorts. To me, it represents one of the things I love most about music in general, which is that you can be any age, from anywhere, at any time and still discover new pieces that speak to you. Of course, the Dylan songs people are discovering right now aren’t new in the sense that they were recorded recently, but they’re falling on fresh ears thanks to some cinematic exposure and clearly striking chords within people. Music made with true intention will always have that effect, no matter how old, as long as listeners are willing to be open to it.”
Ray Padgett, author of Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members who writes the Dylan-focused Substack column, Flagging Down the Double E’s, says, “For years, I was typically the youngest person at any sort of Dylan superfan meetup. But I’m 38 now, and a few times recently I’ve been the oldest person in the group. That’s healthy and necessary for him to avoid being seen as some bygone artist from yesteryear kids read about in history books. I’m all for any big cultural moment like this movie that gives that youthful energy an extra jolt.”
Dylan expert Rebecca Slaman says, “Many non-fans have told me they became interested in learning more about Dylan after watching A Complete Unknown, which makes me just ecstatic. The film is definitely folding new people into Bob fandom (and, I’ve observed, Bob fans into Timothée fandom!), and it will continue to grow.”
And Harold Lepidus, the author of Friends and Other Strangers: Bob Dylan Examined, says, “Among the people I know that are Dylan fans, both hardcore and casual, most are ecstatic about the movie and are happy that a new generation of fans are learning about Dylan.”
Keith Amano shared this anecdote: “Thirty-three years ago (1992), I was a middle school teacher, and whenever I said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ the kids had to call out, ‘World’s greatest singer- songwriter.’ Well, just yesterday, I received a letter in the mail from one of those kids. He wrote, ‘I finally get it. Sitting in our local movie theater a few weeks ago, I had no idea I’d be having flashbacks to seventh grade. But then as I watched the newest Timothée Chalamet movie, I remembered words I had heard dozens of times. ‘The greatest singer-songwriter of all time.’ And then you likely felt an itch at the back of your head as I thought to myself, ‘Damn it all, Mr. Amano was right!’ I had obviously heard plenty of Dylan over the years, but seeing how it came together, how it was contextualized and so on, definitely made me appreciate him in a way I never did before.’”
To some of us, hearing A Complete Unknown referred to as “the newest Timothée Chalamet movie” is like fingernails on a chalkboard. But it is also probably one of the most truthful responses to the film, embodying as it does the strange dialectic between visions of Timothée and “Visions of Johanna.”
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