James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (now in theatres) reflects the evolution of Bob Dylan from a famed folk artist to beginnings of a rock superstar. With Dylan portrayed by Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, the Dylan went electric moment at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was uniquely portrayed in this film.
When Dylan arrived in New York from Minnesota in 1961, it was the middle of a folk music revival. But at Newport in 1965, when Dylan brought his electric guitar on stage for his set with his band, it’s been referenced as this sort of tension between preserving traditional folk music, and embracing more progressive rock music, with Dylan being booed by some in the crowd, while others cheered.
“In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past,” Elijah Wald, author of “Dylan Goes Electric!” wrote. “But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power, abandoning idealism and hope and selling out to the star machine.”
“In this version the Newport festivals were idealistic, communal gatherings, nurturing the growing counterculture, rehearsals for Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and the booing pilgrims were not rejecting that future; they were trying to protect it.”
In some stories, Seeger was reported to be upset about Dylan’s performance with electric instruments, but he’s denied those claims extensively. Seeger told Democracy Now! that he wasn’t angry about what Dylan was playing, but that the sound was so distorted he couldn’t understand what Dylan was singing, and Seeger had requested for the sound to be fixed.
“I was so mad I said, ‘Damn, if I had an axe I’d cut the cable right now,'” he recalled.
But in Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, what’s particularly interesting to see is that while you understand that Dylan and Seeger’s music is going in different directions, there’s still empathy and respect for one another’s artistry.
“Historical assessments tend to be reductive and even back then, it wasn’t click bait, we didn’t have clicking, but even back then there’s great copy in manufacturing conflict,” Edward Norton told Yahoo Canada. “And in a lot of ways, that became one of the great symbolic moments of conflict between one era and another.”
“I think Jim’s point was that’s almost certainly too reductive and indeed that there was a lot playing out. … People moving in different directions isn’t the same as people hating each other.”
Norton added that something Mangold was fond of saying was that, “the most interesting things are when paradoxical ideas coexist.”
“You can love and admire, and deeply respect and appreciate someone, and still feel that you need to go in another lane,” Norton said. “There are different forms of integrity too.”
“I’m so appreciative that [Jim’s] interest was not in arriving at a judgment, but letting you sit with a deeper emotional understanding of what was driving these different people, and sort of having to sift through it. … I appreciate very much when I watch a film and it leaves me with the messiness to sort through on my own.”
A particularly impactful moment of the film, how Mangold portrayed the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is one of the highlights of A Complete Unknown, really leaning into all the different perspectives and opinions around Dylan’s performance.
A Complete Unknown is now in theatres
