“How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be on your own, with no direction home

Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone”

Bob Dylan, a famously elusive and unknowable songwriter now has his own modern film biopic currently playing in movie theaters, A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold. Disruptive, free spirited, and conflicted, Dylan’s musical force is electrically captured by Timothée Chalamet’s wonderfly enigmatic acting and singing. 

While the common biopic film attempts to dissect its subject, scrambling together loose facts and emotional guesswork in order to piece together the making of a star, A Complete Unknown does not attempt to make sense of the famously illusive Bob Dylan. Similarly, it does not paint him as nicer, more palatable, or more understandable. Dylan is a complete unknown and it’s not our job to know him, but to feel the effect of his music through Chalamet’s galvanizing performance. 

The movie illustrates the immense force of Dylan and his lyrics, which culminates in his controversial performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. A Complete Unknown’s mystical and nebulous nature is exactly what makes the film and Bob Dylan so relatable. His protest lyrics can be anything you want them to be, as you struggle against the oppressive status-quo.  

I began listening to a lot of Dylan’s songs this autumn, a few months before the film came out. Back in the fall of 2024, my favorite songs, including ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ were more tied to the stress of applying to colleges and running through the colorful fall leaves during cross country season. Yet, through these turbulent months, including the election of a terrifyingly right-wing government in November, Dylan’s songs have grown to mean so much more for me. Part of this feeling is due to my watching A Complete Unknown.  

The film starts with Bob Dylan being dropped off by a quintessential 1960s carpool in the middle of Greenwich Village in New York. Dylan goes to meet his musical hero, Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy) who is hospitalized in New Jersey. There, Chalamet sings Dylan’s ‘Song to Guthrie’ to a first kindly accommodating, then awestruck, Guthrie and Pete Seeger (talentedly portrayed by Edward Norton). 

From that initial display of talent, a young and playfully insolent Dylan continues to wow his audiences — at local bars, studio recordings, and of course the Newport Folk Festivals. He experiences the struggles of fame, style definitions, and overbearing industry encroachments. In the midst of political upheavals from the Civil Rights Movement, threat of nuclear war, and youth radicalism, Dylan finds his mark.

The film not only explores the impact that Dylan made on the folk community and greater world, but also his personal relationships with both Sylvie Russo (based on Dylan’s ex-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) and social activist and famous contemporary folk musician Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro). Like Dylan, these relationships are not portrayed as particularly good or bad, just complicated. 

A Complete Unknown rarely focuses on the political aspects of Dylan’s songs, choosing not to attempt to understand what made him, but rather to revel in the force he became. However, I couldn’t help paying the closest attention to the musical masterpieces where Dylan calls out the American government in the spirit of youth resistance. 

As John F. Kennedy’s voice rings out on the television, alerting viewers to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film’s audience follows Joan Baez to an underground bar where we see Dylan singing the inflammatory song, ‘Masters of War’ to an entranced audience. He denounces the puppeteers of destruction head on, sparing no sympathy and harboring no fear of reprisals. The lyrics, “And I hope that you die / And your death will come soon” rang out loud and clear. 

As present-day America spirals further into oligarchy and right-wing reaction, I can feel the power of Dylan’s uncompromising lyrics breaking the walls of time. 

Bob Dylan’s music has found itself intertwined deeply into my everyday life. I sit on the subway, fatigued from track practice, impatient to go home. My watch vibrates, and I instinctively look down at the grey screen on my wrist, thinking it’s a text from my parents announcing that they’ve left work. Instead, I got another New York Times notification.

I remember reading an article at dinner yesterday with the headline, “Trump pulls America out of the Paris Climate Agreement” which nearly reduced me to tears. Today it’s news that Trump has frozen federal grants and funding for research. This time I just sigh, and take out my phone. My first thought was that I need to block all these New York Times notifications. Next, I feel a sense of  guilt; I would rather be blissfully uninformed than knowledgeable and ready to act. Wishing to distract myself, but not completely tune out, I pull up my Bob Dylan playlist on Spotify and my finger instinctively slides down to ‘Masters of War.’ I listen carefully to the lyrics — “You play with my world / Like it’s your little toy.”

In A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s songs moved his audiences to action, enhancing my belief in the power of his music. Similarly, my heart felt riddled with a kind of revolutionary spirit as the tune to ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ rang out in the theater. It had the same effect on the Newport Folk Festival attendees as they leapt out of their chairs, at first hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, singing along to the chorus, as Dylan awed them with his inflammatory verses. 

As a student-journalist, I am invigorated by Dylan’s calls to “Keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again / And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.” While the 1960s were a transformative era for social movements and radical youth political organizations, I sense the same energy of protest and community today. People have come together to fight against Trump’s attacks against diversity, immigrants, and the environment. 

Even in scientific research, oppressive censorship is abundant. There is a possibility of the government banning dozens of words from grant proposals including: activism, women, Hispanic communities, male dominated, equality, bias, non-binary, transgender, and many more. These are times of repression, emphasizing the importance of “writers and critics” to lend their pen to the truth and to human rights.

While the Trump Administration has a lot of control, Democrats are not helpless, but they need some major reinvention in order to better address the concerns of the people. As Dylan sings, “Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall / For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.” The battle outside is raging and we need a party that can unite itself to protect the people in danger from the Trump administration. Americans need universal health care, more social services, a federal minimum wage, regulations on large corporations to protect the environment. If not, the people will demand them.

The Bob Dylan song in the movie that is a pinnacle (maybe until ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ at the 1965 Folk Festival) was ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ where we first see the young songwriter find his voice in original protest lyrics. The ambiguity of Dylan and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is a major part of its appeal and continued relevance. The lyrics are purposefully vague, allowing the listener to insert their own meaning into them. “How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? / How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?” is about war, but can be about death and armed conflict in general. 

My first exposure to Bob Dylan as a young kid when my grandfather played ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on his guitar. It was the only Dylan song that he could play, and he sang it to me recently again at a family dinner. He stopped at the lyrics, “How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” He asked me, “how can people be so inhumane?” I did know what to say and let Dylan answer, “The answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

The final climax of A Complete Unknown is the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Dylan strayed from the expectations of demands of his folk mentors and unveiled his new electric style with ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ and ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.’ I felt Dylan’s youthful anger in a world that wants him to be something he isn’t. “Well, I try my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them.” 

I live in a country whose leadership I did not vote for, and whose ideas of unrestrained capitalism and individualism I do not believe in. For Dylan, Maggie’s farm could have meant a multitude of different things, from the traditional folk community to the expectations for youth to be reverent and obedient to the adults in power. For me, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is the expectation to join corporate America or participate productively in an imperialist and conservative society. Well, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm, no more.” 

In real life, Bob Dylan’s songs have had an influential impact on radical student groups since the very beginning. In 1968, the revolutionary organization, the Weather Underground, published its maiden manifesto, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” named after the lyrics in Dylan’s song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ Again, these young radicals are trying to reclaim ownership of their lives, saying that you don’t need an authority figure to tell you the direction the world is heading, which for the Weathermen was toward liberation.

To the Weather Underground, Dylan’s songs denouncing war are about United States violence and imperialism in Vietnam. For me, it’s about the horrific destruction and loss of life in Palestine, funded by American money and made possible by American weapons. 

Dylan also wrote a lot about racism in songs like ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and ‘Only A Pawn in Their Game.’ He performed at the March on Washington and his music became anthems in the streets for a generation of protesters. 

We are once again living in a time of heightened disregard for civil rights. President Trump is trying to reverse the clock on liberation movements, for example, rescinding a 1960s executive order that banned discrimination in the workplace. In a frenzy of repealing diversity programs, Trump is determined to undermine American civil rights that people fought to gain for decades. 

As it is in times of repression, people are once again banding together in service of national struggle and liberation. I spend every Monday at The People’s Forum where organizers make posters informing people of their rights before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and have a hotline to respond to raids and deportations. 

On my way home, I open up my Bob Dylan playlist, “For the times they are a-changin.’” 

As present-day America spirals further into oligarchy and right-wing reaction, I can feel the power of Dylan’s uncompromising lyrics breaking the walls of time.