From a complete unknown to a revolutionary

They’re selling postcards of the hanging ...

No, it’s not the words of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck or Jean-Paul Sartre, it’s a young man barely blown in from the American Midwest to the centre of the universe, New York. He’s in his early twenties, and words and songs are shooting out of his mind and heart like sparks from a fire. The young man is Bob Dylan. It’s 1965.

That fire is still burning. It’s 2025. The film A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, opens in Melbourne cinemas this week. It chronicles Dylan’s early years in New York, from his arrival in 1961 to his transformation from just a kid with a guitar to a musical revolutionary.

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown.

It speaks to the enormous influence and the weight and heft of Dylan’s work that a film on the artist’s early years is being given the airing and the notice worldwide that it is, even though it is but a fraction of the whole.

Dylan changed popular music. His genius, at first, was to mine the veins of folk and blues and merge it with the echoes of literature, which he had immersed himself in to create a poetry of the sensibilities in music that had never been played or heard before. Then, he plugged in his electric guitar. And his vision and power was amplified. It crashed into the norms of the day, it swept some away, it carried others with it.

It opened the doors to musicians and songwriters of what was possible. For its time, it was incendiary. Half a century later he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award was given “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

Dylan, on receiving the award, cited three works that were pivotal to him: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey. These all go deep into what is a life, what is flesh and blood heir to but struggle and toil, heartbreak and hope, love and death. In his memoir Chronicles Part I, he also describes the devouring of the classics, how he dived into their pages, memorised lines from them. He was extracting life from those lines on the page, just as he was from listening to musicians that had had an impact on him, at first Buddy Holly, then Leadbelly, then through the legends of folk and blues.

And through the sieve, as he filtered it all, and then moulded it into a shape, he landed at this in 1965:

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
like a complete unknown,
like a rolling stone.

And he arrived on stage with an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival to sing it, many seeing in him a messiah and prophet for the times, many wanting to own him, to define him. He wasn’t having any of it. The film conflates the Newport festival, where an enraged Pete Seeger, icon of the folk movement, wants to pull the plug on his amp, and Dylan’s concert in Manchester the next year, where an audience member yells out to him “Judas!”, to which Dylan yells back, “I don’t believe you, you’re a liar”, then turns to his band and says: “Play it f---ing loud.”

In his Nobel reply, Dylan said: “If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”

Pete Seeger, who was infuriated by Dylan going electric at Newport folk festival in 1965.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

For a long time and perhaps to this day, Dylan has had to battle that problem. There’s many a clip of someone asking him what his songs mean, as if the answer will be a divine revelation on how to live your life. Indeed, this writer as a teenager was drawn first to his words, and thinking, yeah but what’s the meaning behind “they’re selling postcards of the hanging”? I found out much later it is a reference to a gruesome lynching in Dylan’s home town of Duluth, and they did indeed sell postcards of the event.

It is not beyond hyperbole to describe songwriting in terms of before and after Dylan. As Shane Howard has said, songwriters all owe their jobs to Dylan.

As if the legacy of that were not enough, there is also a museum of Dylan and his work in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Among the archival material, you can even buy a T-shirt with the words “play it f---ing loud” on it.

A Complete Unknown – in which Chalamet by all accounts does a convincing Dylan – details the genesis of the artist, who more than 60 years on is still tapping the muse and moving the culture. This surely is without parallel. Here is the genius of his work, the multitudes of his universe still resonant, still chiming, in our culture. This happens even without hearing his voice, his music, his words directly. His is the invisible river.

Bob Dylan turns 84 this year.Credit: Getty Images

In his Nobel acceptance speech, delivered remotely, Dylan said: “Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.

“The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.

“I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story’.”

Thanks Bob.

Warwick McFadyen is an Age desk editor.

A Complete Unknown opens on January 25.