Throughout the second half of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, road manager Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) continuously asks Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) a simple question:
Electric or acoustic?
It’s direct and succinct, but the answer may not be as simple as one may think.
For a while, Dylan has been wrestling with his inner feelings as an artist. He wants to evolve folk from the confines traditionalists like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) are boxing it in. But he’s afraid that, with his desire to become more than most people want him to be, the public isn’t ready for such an evolutionary leap in music, sonically and artistically.
The a-changin’ times Dylan has been living in have grown far more politically charged than just a few years ago when a complete unknown stepped into Guthrie’s hospital room to visit him. A chance meeting with Seeger led him to sing for his hero, quickly propelling him to stardom and meeting some of the most famous singers in America, such as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). It might have seemed like the times were much more freewheeling then: Dylan enjoyed singing music steeped in well-established folk patterns, and the public loved discovering how his song structures differed from Baez and Cash, but it was still not a radical, alienating shift.
With only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, his voice and rhythm pattern defied any pre-conceived expectations, positioning him as a pioneer. Dylan gets immediately signed by CBS under the supervision of Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). But through the eyes of Seeger, Dylan’s sudden contemplation between using an electric guitar to bring folk to a territory never before explored and staying with the soft, unimaginative field of an acoustic guitar terrifies him. The current form that folk is taking isn’t political, nor does it take any meaningful stances on issues surrounding the American people. But the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, alongside the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, has made Dylan far angrier and aware of the problems that America is now ‘waking up’ to.
Electric or acoustic?
Dylan can’t stay silent and is now suffocating by the mere idea of conforming to an ideal everyone wants him to be. For him, the acoustic guitar represents the worst part of himself, continuing to appease the public when he doesn’t want to (as illustrated by a scene where Dylan chides Baez for wanting to sing what the audience wants to hear instead of exploring something completely different). It’s why “going electric” would mean traveling where no one has ever dared to explore and guide a public that’s already far more conscious than they were a few years ago.
The public is ready, Dylan thinks. They seem to be but are unwilling to accept it and would rather stay in the crowd-pleasing songs they know by heart and would like to hear instead of taking the courage to listen to something they’ve never heard of before. But no artist has the moral courage to make them think about anything other than “This land was made for you and me.” Seeger has no spine. His banjo represents a once-innovative instrument that has become a dust collector for people who would rather reminisce about ‘what was’ than move forward into the future. Worse yet, Guthrie is dying. Someone has to say something, anything, about the era they are living in, one whose politics have a profound effect on Americans and has divided society to irreparable heights.
If someone doesn’t sing about these issues, who will?
“Electric or acoustic?” is more than a simple question. It’s the eternal debate that plagues Dylan’s journey in A Complete Unknown – a film whose separation in two clear parts contrasts itself between the ‘birth’ of a new folk artist attempting to make his mark in the music scene, where so many talented, up-and-coming musicians also leaped, and the eventual ‘destruction’ of everything traditional folk singers hold dear.
What does it mean for the future of folk when a 21-year-old like Dylan wants to go somewhere no one desires even to touch by simply choosing an electric guitar? How does this choice affect how music is perceived on a cellular level, as not just a simple artistic expression but an act of political defiance and a way to speak out against the injustices that have been boiling in his mind? He knows the risk of choosing “electric” over “acoustic.” He knows he will not be met with the same fame and adoration that millions of fans have given him all across America. But he also knows that in remaining with the status quo and not allowing folk to move forward, this country will regress – and the world with it.
Maybe this was all a futile effort. Maybe, by looking at society today, none of what Dylan has sung has transcended into something concrete. But there was a real urgency at the time in doing what needed to be done and leading society away from the ‘traditions’ of doing – and saying – nothing. That’s Dylan’s most significant contribution to music. And that is what Mangold more than represents in his 140-minute-long biopic that never explicitly states this as an inextricable fact but infers on it for the entire runtime and continuously points the audience to the same existential question:
Electric or acoustic?
Interestingly enough, no one pays attention to this question when it’s asked until they realize it’s why this movie exists. Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks trust the audience’s intelligence in putting two and two together and not being handheld by someone who will point at the screen and point-blank say, “This is what Dylan has accomplished.” He lets the political backdrop slowly reach the forefront of the picture so that when he eventually goes electric, it feels like a genuine shock to the system. It’s why he gets booed by the audience and rejected by his peers. It’s why Seeger attempts to destroy the speakers instead of letting him and his band do what is morally righteous.
But it’s also why this gesture ultimately stood the test of time and became his most-known album, Bringing It All Back Home. He had to do it because no one else would’ve. Perhaps in a few years from that point in time, someone would’ve done it, but would it have the same impact as it did? Probably not.
He knew it wouldn’t be received like his previous records did. Still, once people started paying attention to his lyrics and removed themselves from a sound they weren’t accustomed to hearing, the album quickly became one of the greatest ever in music history. It took a while for us to accept it as a leap forward in rock/folk, but it solidified Bob Dylan as one of the greatest artists ever gracing this earth. It’s even better when such an icon is wondrously realized by Chalamet, who has no desire to do a cheap imitation but pays tribute to a person whom he has great reverence for.
Add Barbaro’s career-defining, star-making turn as Baez, who brilliantly unmasks Dylan’s façade on stage, and you’ve got a real winner. It may be a tad too long, and its central relationship with Dylan and a fictitious version of Suze Rotolo named Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) stays in mawkish, uninteresting platitudes, but how Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael constructs the movie is a feat to behold.
It’s that simple question that makes this experience worthwhile. And to be honest, A Complete Unknown may be his most inaccessible – and alienating – movie yet. It refuses to give easy answers to the ones who wanted to get their hands held by a filmmaker whose last film was an unfortunate victim of the Disney corporate machine and sucked the creative juice he demonstrated in his previous efforts, Cop Land, Walk the Line, The Wolverine, Logan, and Ford v. Ferrari.
It also refuses to give a “broad portrait” of Dylan, preferring to focus on the question that changed folk (and music) forever. Many won’t even realize its importance until Dylan does something he’s never done before in his career, which occurs at a breakneck pace throughout the movie.
In 1965, as he’s about to close the Newport Folk Festival, something clicks in him, and Dylan doesn’t answer Neuwirth back when he says :
Electric or acoustic?
He has to think for a bit, stop and wonder what all of this success means. He knows that if he stays the course, he will ultimately be forgotten, the same way the masses are currently ignoring Seeger. But this hesitation is depicted as the culmination of a man whose entire career has been plagued by people who made decisions for him instead of making his own.
Dylan says it after attending a party, “Two hundred people in that room, and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should just fuck off and let me be.”
That’s why, when Neuwirth asks him the same question again before closing the Newport Folk Festival, he hesitates. He’s never done this before. He doesn’t even give an answer. One has to wait before he decides to “go electric.”
For the first time in his music career, Bob Dylan experiences a moment where he thinks for himself and does what everyone does not want him to do.
What happens next is, as the kids say, history.
A Complete Unknown is now playing in theatres.
