Obsessing over Bob Dylan

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This article was published 28/05/2025 (302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bob Dylan, the enigmatic musician, singer and songwriter, turned 84 years old on May 24. His remarkable career has now spanned more than 60 years. He has been bestowed with numerous honours including the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

There can be no denying Dylan’s enduring legacy as one of the greatest songwriters in history. But he was and remains a complex personality.

The recent film A Complete Unknown is a biopic about his early years in New York City’s Greenwich Village from 1961 to 1965, when he literally went from being “a complete unknown” — a phrase he used in one of his most celebrated songs, Like a Rolling Stone — to the most revered folk singer in United States and beyond.

A telling scene takes place the morning after an intimate night Dylan spent with Joan Baez, then a young rising folk star played perfectly by Monica Barbaro. She snaps at Dylan, played equally as perfectly by Timotheé Chalamet.

“You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” says Baez, in response to Dylan’s caustic comments about her alleged weak songwriting skills.

“Yeah, I guess,” he mutters, before launching into a rendition of one of his iconic songs, Blowin’ in the Wind.

Despite her anger, Baez is so taken by the song that she sits down beside Dylan to sing it with him. The real Joan Baez did in fact record her own version of Blowin’ in the Wind, among many other Dylan songs she covered.

“Dylanologists” have pointed out several errors in the movie’s narrative and the not-quite-correct timeline it uses. Such is literary licence. The film, which reaches its climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan “went electric” — using an electric rather than acoustic guitar was regarded as an act of “heresy” by true “folkies” — is superb nonetheless.

I first saw A Complete Unknown last December when it was released and was bowled over by the music and the performances of the main actors. In addition to Chalamet and Barbaro, who both learned how to sing and play the guitar at the same time — Chalamet mastered the harmonica as well — the cast also includes Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, who is supposed to be artist Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first true love and the woman snuggling with him on the cover of his 1963 breakout album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Since the movie started streaming on Disney Plus, I have become somewhat obsessed with it and have watched it another six times. I saw Dylan perform once in Toronto in October 1978. As I recall, much to the consternation of those in attendance, he sang alternate and odd versions of some of his best-known songs. He also lived up to his reputation for being uncommunicative; during the concert, he barely acknowledged the audience. Still, at 37 years old, there was a definite aura about him.

A Complete Unknown captures his enormous drive and talent as well as his introverted nature, his attempt to disown his past as Robert Zimmerman, the middle-class son of Jewish parents in Hibbing, Minn., and his insensitive, even callous, treatment of Rotolo and Baez. Both loved him deeply, supported his career, especially Baez, and urged him to embrace the social injustices of the 1960s. And he cheated on both of them.

Rotolo, who met him when she was 17 and he was 20, resisted speaking publicly about her relationship with Dylan for more than four decades. She eventually revealed much in her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, published in 2008 three years before she died from lung cancer at the age of 67. As a younger woman, she could not, as she puts it, deal with the “aura of darkness and intensity” that “enveloped” her when she was with him.

Baez, who performed melodic duets with Dylan, wrote the haunting song Diamonds and Rust in 1975 about their tormented relationship. She admitted only recently that he broke her heart. Yet, at the age of 84, she says she has finally forgiven him.

In a rare 2004 interview with Ed Bradley on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, Dylan conceded that he does not know how he wrote so many poetic songs when he was in his early 20s and did not think he could replicate such a period of creativity again.

As the movie depicts, he had a difficult time with his overnight success and the explosive fame it generated. He resented being labelled “a cultural and political icon.” As he writes in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, “people have always told me that I’m a protest singer or the voice of a generation, but I write for me.” His legion of fans, who latched on to his 1964 anthem-like song The Times They Are A-Changin’, profoundly disagreed.

Rotolo, perhaps understood him best. “Bob was driven—focused on his path,” she writes. “He was his own person…Artists we admire aren’t necessarily exemplary human beings just because they are exceptional in their chosen fields. Their art is their work offered for public consumption, and nothing else.”

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.