What I did on Tuesday Afternoon - Thinking About Bob Dylan - A Complete Unknown at The Tyneside Cinema

 

'How does it feel. To be on your own. With no direction home. Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone.'

I went to see the latest and much praised new Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown at The Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle on Tuesday afternoon. Had a chat with the guy behind the entrance desk about the man and the film which he hadn't seen yet. Renewed my membershup card and walked downstairs into the impressive ground floor cinema. Bought a tub of popcorn and a glass bottle of fizzing coke from the astonishingly pretty young usherette, (are you allowed to say that anymore). 

I carried them back to my seat in one of the back rows which I found to my delight I had entirely to myself. Sat back and watch the trailers and then on to enjoy A Complete Unknown. Once you've renewed your membership at The Tyneside Cinema your first three films are free. 'The best things in  life are free...'  . Yes I know that's not one of Bob's. But free things are great.They're the best.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Complete Unknown from start to finish. I thought it took a great approach for telling a story that has been told many times in many ways. This struck me as a very sensible way of telling this story in 2025.  At a time when it's really worth thinking about what Dylan decided to do what he decided to do and then decided he could not and would not be contained by those who on the surface were his fellow travellers. The New York Greenwich Village scene. The Folk tradition which could easily have been enough for him and kept him safe. Ultimately a footnote in musical and cultural history, albeit a notable one.

But Dylan is more significant than this. Regardless of the naysayers. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature and there's a reason for this. Reasons. Because he more than any artist of the Sixties asked the signifucant questions. And kept asking them. Why war? Why resist change? What are you afraid of? What does it mean to be alive? What does it feel like to fall in love? And to fall out of love. Why do you think you're on my side? I don't think we have anything in common. How does power operate. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. Where's the sense of that. Why can't society stand back and make more rational decisions than this? It still can't by the way. In fact it's getting worse. Look at the state of the world.It's not my job to go into that in any more detail here. It's all our jobs. If we care. We should. 

I'm not a Dyanoligist. I have a clutch of his best known albums. I listen to them now and then. I think about his songs now and then. I don't plan to write a book,or write a poem about the man.But I did like the film. I really enjoyed it. It was over two hours long but it didn't lag for a moment. Momentum was its driving impulse. Telling the story of  a great artist's formative years, When he's making his splash.And how he feints and swerves as only Dylan can and has ever since. The significance of which  has still not been absorbed. Perhaps not even by the man himself. 

A Complete Unknown tells a story in a way that seemed to be to be authentic and believable from the off until its closing credits. Dylan's relationships with his guiding mentor Woody Guthrie. Dying painfully and painfully slowly in the hospital bed that Bob keeps coming back to throughout, right until the end of the film. Pete Seeger, Ed Norton is terrific and almost steals the film. Sylvie Russo,Joan Baez,  Albert Grossman, Johnny Cash, Bobby Neuwirth. I don't know this story as well as others. I know more about The Beatles. Lou and the Velvets, Patti, Television and R.E.M. That's my Golden Thread.

But I thought this was incredibly powerful and very well told and framed. It's why I'll always come back to Dylan once in a while. I kid myself that I looked a bit like him when I was nineteen. He's not a bad person to look a bit like when you're young. To try to be a bit like as you grow old. 

I loved most of all when the film showed him play these mercurial quicksilver songs that made his name. To watch the reactions of those he was with as he played them for the first time . the way their jaws don't drop exactly but how their eyes register that they are hearing songs that will change the culture and the world and the way we look at it and live within it forever. The object of true art. The way that as the film goes on you realise that his fellow travellers and his audiences just want him to play the same songs again in the same way but he's just not willing to as he unveils another masterpiece that he's just come out with .He'd rather play that. He will only play that, Their jaws drop again. He keeps moving forward as he must. The film ends with Bob on his bike, just as it should. All power to the old contrary buzzard. Time to get on our own bikes...