The new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, sees prominent young actor Timothée Chalamet star as the iconic musician in the time leading up to the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Based on Elijah Wald's biography Dylan Goes Electric, the film confronts how that notorious performance forever defined Dylan as a non-conformist who has answered to no one but himself for his decades-long career.

Today on Commotion, Bob Dylan experts Vish Khanna, Caryn Rose and Ian Grant review the new Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and explain how Dylan has remained such an iconic yet enigmatic figure in pop culture for more than 60 years.

Elamin: I'm not sure this is a good movie about Bob Dylan. I think it's a good movie about the moment that Bob Dylan came through. It gives you a very good idea about the things he was chafing against, about the notion of what folk music was trying to do at the time and what it means for an artist to make the choice of saying, "I'm not your guy. I think I can do that for a moment, but then I also have to sort of evolve and figure out what else I am." But I'm not really sure that it reveals a lot about Dylan himself.

Caryn, one of the main reasons for making a biopic on a legacy artist like Bob Dylan is to reintroduce the music to a new generation that may not be necessarily familiar with the mythology. And so building this whole movie around Dylan going electric, this foundational moment, seems to make a lot of sense to me, because that's the incident that gives Dylan his mythology. But if you can put yourself in the shoes of a 15-year-old viewer who knows very little about Dylan, what impression do you think you get about who Bob Dylan is from watching this movie?

Caryn: I thought they did a remarkably good job in setting up the emotional stakes of Newport. It feels fraught. It feels problematic. Yeah, it's a little over the top, but it's also a movie…. If I didn't know the story as well as I did, I would feel invested. I would feel some emotional tension.

But there's a second part to that, which is it's really hard to look at it now and understand why these people were so upset. I'm watching the extras in the audience going, really? You're this upset?... But I think they do a good job in setting up emotional tension. If you're willing to not be us and not bring that bushel of knowledge back into the theater with you, I think they do a decent job in making you invested in the storyline. Whether or not we argue about how fraught it actually was.

Vish: I will say, one thing that the film emphasizes is obviously Dylan going electric at Newport, and over time almost everyone involved in that when they talk about the booing and the anger, it's come to pass that they were mostly angry at how bad it sounded. Like, that weekend was full of people, like, more so in that festival's history, a lot of people played electric.

Caryn: Johnny Cash had an electric guitar player in his band!

Vish: It wasn't this conflation of he went electric and people were upset. I think they were upset because, and Pete Seeger said it numerous times over the years as he reflected upon that moment: "I couldn't hear Bobby's words." This is a guy whose words we admired, and the sound was bad. What I want to see is a biopic about the sound people.

Elamin: Nobody's going to walk into the theatre for that.

Ian: Good luck raising the money for that, Vish.

Vish: Alright, fair enough.

Elamin: Ian, in many ways I think the thing that we're all reacting to is if Dylan is this creature of mythology, who spent all this time building this story about himself, and then you get this movie that is maybe the beginnings of where he says, "I'm not going to be the hero for the folk movement. I'm interested in growing as an artist and exploring what that means for me." That's the thing that makes Dylan the artist who's put out 55 albums, and has made you launch a Bob Dylan podcast. There is something about his approach to music and to being an artist that is compelling, and it starts there. Do you think you get enough insight from this movie as to the kind of artist Dylan is?

Ian: You get some, which is not to say none, right? I do think in many ways the thesis of his life is contained there at the very end of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue: "Strike another match, go start anew."… This story that's told in this film is absolutely the first instance of that thing he's doing, striking another match, and absolutely the most well-known and culturally impactful instance of that, I would say. At the same time, there's so many other instances of this that he's going to do again over the following 10, 20, 30, 50 years that to me at this point, Newport feels like a drop in the bucket. And I would say in terms of the, like, aging-rock star kind of corporate machine, when you think of these biopics — you know, there was the Freddie Mercury one, the Elton John one, the David Bowie one — the intention there is to sort of tell these stories.

The beats are known. The beginning is known. The end is known. And we can kind of fix them in history, and explain them and contextualize them, and present them to a new audience. To me, Bob's entire career has been sort of fighting back against that kind of thesis, or way of looking at his career. Like, he just wrapped up his latest tour seven weeks ago in the Royal Albert Hall in London where, you know, he obviously played some impactful shows in '65 and '66. And so, I would say Bob Dylan in particular is uniquely poorly-suited for this type of movie, with this intention of telling the canonical Bob Dylan story and fixing him at a moment in time in history, because he is as vital of a performing, working artist in 2024 as he was in 1964.