The perfect time for a Bob Dylan biopic is now
Music is in great shape at the moment. That might sound like the expected thing for a Music Editor to say, but it is true. There are over 100,000 songs recorded and released every day; it goes without saying that some of them are really good. It also goes without saying that such a constant stream of releases comes with its inherent problems, but an ever-diversifying world of sound is the silver lining. Ironically, if there is one element that might be in short supply, it is the simple ‘four chords and the truth’ tenet of folk that the great Bob Dylan trafficked.
He is, in my book, the greatest artist of all time. Not because of his inherent gifts—his voice is a bleating crow compared to songbirds like Aretha Franklin or even Kathleen Battle. Nor because of his trained abilities—Miles Davis would be well within his rights to scoff at the limited musical vocabulary that Dylan trades in. Not even because of the poetic prowess he brought to his humble folk craft, given that the likes of Leonard Cohen are surely comparable on this front. But because in a manner unrivalled anywhere in art, he seized a pivotal moment in history with more immediacy, meaning, influence and magic than anyone before or since.
Yet, as the new origin story biopic, A Complete Unknown, looks to show, he didn’t do this in some sudden viral sensationalist manner. He was, in effect, a broken string away from vagrancy on the streets of New York. We might now think that fortunes turned to favoursome in a flash for the original vagabond once he released his second record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, a masterpiece now considered the record that changed the world, in actuality, it peaked in the US at a measly 22. Does anyone know who is number 22 in the charts right now?
Dylan’s rise from the lowly reaches of culture in Greenwich Village clubs was not a glamorous one. There was no eureka moment as an exec saw him wow an awed crowd – even after John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, he was scoffed at and nicknamed Hammond’s folly – and no papers ever printed that the next big thing had been found. In effect, Dylan was doing something so new with something so timeless that it was barely realised at first, and he had to drag the world up by its bootstraps to his new progressive height.
In this way, Dylan can rightly be reconciled as the most unlikely phenomenon there has ever been. A decade ago, the mighty Coen brothers flirted with a Dylan biopic of sorts with Inside Llewyn Davis, but they rightly realised that Dylan’s tale defies the scene that they were trying to capture. That would be like making a feature that reflects the tough lives of trawlermen and centring it on Jacques Cousteau. Yes, the scene around Dylan was typified by the film’s fateful line: “If it was never new and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song”. There isn’t much space for an individual to shine in that little epithet.
However, in the years since Inside Llewyn Davis was released, the world has changed. In fact, the wars, divides, technological fears and hopes, frenzied discussion, assassination attempts, and so on, more closely reflect Dylan’s 1960s era than any period in the interim years. So, in these heady days, perhaps what the daunted youth need more than ever is a symbol of simple, dignified, hope.
It’s time to focus on the star who did it on his own, did it right and changed the world for the better. That’s what Dylan provides, and with the youth’s favourite, Timothée Chalamet, stepping into his dogeared shoes, perhaps the original vagabong will be endeared to yet another generation at just the right time.
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