by Geoffrey Churchman

Apart from Generation Z’ers. probably everyone knows who Bob Dylan is even if they don’t appreciate the impact he had on popular music from the early 1960s to the present. Circa 1964, I remember a small group of women singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’ on a Karori (Wellington) bus, so awareness of him and his songs had spread quickly.

This movie takes as its starting point Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 as an impecunious 19 year old mainly to visit a hero, significant folk singer Woody Guthrie who had been hospitalised with Huntington’s disease. In fact the hospital was in New Jersey, but NYC had a budding music scene in clubs, coffee houses in the Greenwich Village district and it was the ideal place to get known as a singer / songwriter. There at the same time were folksinger and banjo player Pete Seeger, and protest singer Joan Baez both of whom he became firm friends with, and in the latter case, it seems, more than that.

Although his songs showed a strong consciousness to how the world works and how it should work, Bob Dylan nevertheless was aloof, self-centred and not the easiest person to get along with, some of that caused by alcohol. His relationships with women and music industry people get depicted as such.

The local fame spread after the release of records — his first LP was mainly covers of other songs, but subsquently his own compositions. One well-known artist who sent him a fan letter was Johnny Cash and they likewise meet up.

But the main aspect is the music scene that was developing in America, with occasional references to Britain with the beat-pop scene headed by the Beatles and the Kinks. Lyrically, folk music then was to a big degree a contrarian response to the establishment and the turmoil accompanying social change, as well as to America’s foreign conflicts (things haven’t changed much!).

The movie leads up to and finishes with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival held annually in Rhode Island. At the 3 previous festivals he had played an acoustic guitar (plus a harmonica) but clearly influenced by other developments in popular music he developed group arrangements, among others, with the song “Like a Rolling Stone”, featuring Chicago blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper on the organ. A line in the song provides the movie’s title and it became a pop classic, particularly after Jimi Hendric covered it at the 1967 Monterey festival.

Another song which became iconic in 1965 was “Highway 61”. When Dylan played Western Springs (Auckland) in March 1978, I remember him dedicating it to NZ’s then Highway 61 biker club. It was notably covered by Texas blues legend Johnny Winter.

Dylan’s transition to electric guitar at Newport in 1965 wasn’t liked by folk purists and that is given plenty of coverage, although the movie seems to overstate it quite a lot. At Western Springs his set was totally electric, so it seems to have been an enduring switch.

Apart from over-dramatizing some things there is very little I can fault with A Complete Unknown — it presents all the songs that are important from those years, has a good cast, conveys the Zeitgeist well, has an excellent soundtrack, has a lot of classic cars as props (for those into them like me!), looks authentic and succeeds well as a (partial) biopic.

A Complete Unknown (141 minutes) is screening at the Shoreline in Waikanae.