They’re selling postcards of the hanging …
No, it’s not the words of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck or Jean-Paul Sartre, it’s a young man barely blown in from the American Midwest to the centre of the universe, New York. He’s in his early twenties, and words and songs are shooting out of his mind and heart like sparks from a fire. The young man is Bob Dylan. It’s 1965.
That fire is still burning. It’s 2025. The film A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, opens in Melbourne cinemas this week. It chronicles Dylan’s early years in New York, from his arrival in 1961 to his transformation from just a kid with a guitar to a musical revolutionary.
It speaks to the enormous influence and the weight and heft of Dylan’s work that a film on the artist’s early years is being given the airing and the notice worldwide that it is, even though it is but a fraction of the whole.
Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown
Dylan changed popular music. His genius, at first, was to mine the veins of folk and blues and merge it with the echoes of literature, which he had immersed himself in to create a poetry of the sensibilities in music that had never been played or heard before. Then, he plugged in his electric guitar. And his vision and power was amplified. It crashed into the norms of the day, it swept some away, it carried others with it.
It opened the doors to musicians and songwriters of what was possible. For its time, it was incendiary. Half a century later he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award was given “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Dylan, on receiving the award, cited three works that were pivotal to him: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey. These all go deep into what is a life, what is flesh and blood heir to but struggle and toil, heartbreak and hope, love and death. In his memoir Chronicles Part I, he also describes the devouring of the classics, how he dived into their pages, memorised lines from them. He was extracting life from those lines on the page, just as he was from listening to musicians that had had an impact on him, at first Buddy Holly, then Leadbelly, then through the legends of folk and blues.
And through the sieve, as he filtered it all, and then moulded it into a shape, he landed at this in 1965:
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
like a complete unknown,
like a rolling stone.
