Bob Dylan Biopic "No Direction Home" Misses the Politics -- And the Pot

For a moment, I loved it. 

Watching Timothée Chalamet step off a bus in Greenwich Village on a quest to find Woody Guthrie, wearing that classic Dutch boy cap and looking for all the world like a young Bob Dylan, I almost felt like I was there. In "A Complete Unknown," Chalamet does an amazing job capturing Dylan's voice while performing some of his greatest songs. 

But in the end, the film ends in a muddle of mixed non-reasons Dylan abandons his folkie roots, mistreats his women, and questions his own talent and importance. 

It wasn't just sudden, huge fame that changed Dylan. His fame was such that people almost thought he was the second coming, our society's savior. More than anyone, his lyrics nailed his times, when the civil rights, environmental, and anti-war movements coalesced, all fueled by music—and marijuana. 

Yet, not only is there no pot smoking at all in "A Complete Unknown," there's practically no discussion or presentation whatsoever about the politics of the time in the film. In one scene, Dylan watches the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on TV and is sought out by Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) while playing his masterful song "Masters of War" in a coffeeshop, after which they (rather inexplicably) make out in the stairwell and sleep together. But despite Baez's strong political beliefs and activism, and the fact that she and Dylan performed together at the 1963 March on Washington, the two never talk politics in the film. Yeah, right. Instead, he's shown acting out on stage when the two tour because he's tired of performing "Blowin' in the Wind." 

Another disturbing thing about the movie is the fictionalization of Dylan's girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who is renamed Sylvia and played by Elle Fanning. Rotolo is the girl on Dylan's arm on the cover of his "Freewheelin'" album. She lived with Dylan for four years and is credited in his autobiography with influencing his life, activism and art. "Meeting her was like stepping into the Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights," he wrote. She inspired his songs “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “One Too Many Mornings” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.”

In her memoir A Freewheelin' Time, Rotolo writes what Canadian folk musician Ian Tyson [whose partner's name was Sylvia] first turned Bob onto pot, one day in their flat. A fellow Minnesotan calling himself Diamond Dave claims he and Bonnie Beecher (aka Jahanara Romney, who married Wavy Gravy) were high school friends with Bob and smoked pot with him as early as 1961. 

In any case, Dylan is famously known to have turned the Beatles onto marijuana when they came to the US in 1964, as recently re-told by Ringo Starr on Jimmy Kimmel's show. I spent an afternoon with a Bob Dylan songbook and came up with all kinds of theories about many of his songs that could have been about the weed. But what we have in "No Direction Home" is a sanitized version of Dylan that erases any possible drug use, and focuses on things like love triangles instead of the greater issues at hand, and that's hugely disappointing. 

The climax of the film is set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan was booed by the crowd for playing an electric set. Folk musician Pete Seeger, well portrayed by the always-excellent Edward Norton, famously said he'd like to have taken an axe to the power lines during the performance, though he later told Amy Goodman it was because the sound was so distorted you couldn't hear the words. 

It's telling to me that, urged to do an acoustic encore to that performance, Dylan played, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Remember, this is just after the JFK assassination when Dylan may well have thought he and his baby blue eyes would also be targeted, as were others like Phil Ochs. Joan Baez's song about her relationship with Bob, "Diamonds and Rust," has the lines, "The Madonna was yours for free / yes the girl on the half shell / could keep you unharmed." When he accepted the Kennedy Center Award in 1997, he looked nervous as hell to me, as though he was uncomfortable being in public in that way. 

In his memoirs Dylan is constantly reading, learning, distilling all of that and the heady times he lived in into lyrics that understood it all and possibly showed us a new way forward. There's a reason he's the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. But in the film he wonders aloud where his songs came from. 

I got to see Dylan play at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood just after the Rodney King riots/rebellion in 1992. He played an acoustic set, then an electric one. His first encore was electric and when he came back for a second one, I prayed/chanted, "Please make it acoustic." He played an acoustic "Blowin' in the Wind" and the lyrics had so much meaning at that moment. How many times, indeed? If we had seen justice then, there would have been no George Floyd or a need for the Black Lives Matter movement. 

We had to wait until the end of the credits for "A Complete Unknown" to hear the other song Dylan did as his acoustic encore in Newport, "Mr. Tambourine Man" with its trippy "smoke rings of my mind" lyrics. No doubt the movie will reach a new generation that will be introduced to this remarkable artist, but they'll have to do a little digging to find the real Dylan, and his times.  

Norton, interviewed by Stephen Colbert, mused about how different the times were at "this delicate moment when art, youth and the culture of our country and the progressive attempts to advance the human cause were woven into each other so tightly," before young people were tied to their phones and social media instead of interacting directly with each other. "It's really worth immersing back into this word when all people have was pen and paper....what they produced was so important." Discussing the non-human experience of AI, Norton noted it would never write lyrics like, "to dance beneath the diamond sky / with one hand waving free...You can run AI for a thousand years, and it's not going to write Bob Dylan songs." 

Bill Maher's commentary on Real Time last week called for the Dylan song "Everything is Broken" to become our new anthem "while America is at peak Chalamet." Playing a clip of the song, he said, "Yeah, kids. You didn't know he could get down like that, did you?" They do now.