In new Dylan biopic, his civil rights work is glossed over for other narratives
By R.J. Morgan
Searchlight’s Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” blew into theaters across the country on Christmas Day to much fanfare and nostalgia.
Led by Oscar-bait performances by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, the film does a great job of summarizing the four-year period between Dylan’s unceremonious 1961 arrival in New York City’s Greenwich Village and his rockstar turn by “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
In between, he writes some of the most socially conscious songs of the era, earns a reputation as the “Voice of a Generation” and leaves a smattering of personal and professional chaoses in his wake.
But why were his songs so powerful? Maybe because of the magnitude of the struggles they illuminated.
To understand, we must look at the political issues of the time, primarily the Civil Rights Movement taking hold in the American South. The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 radicalized a generation of young people to fight for social change as if their very lives depended on it (in many cases, it did). By the 1960s, multiple organizations were hard at work trying to desegregate the South and help Black southerners earn the unimpeded right to vote.
“A Complete Unknown” glosses over much of Dylan’s civil rights work in favor of other narratives, but his activism, for a brief period, was very real. Indoctrinated into the political left by Seeger, Baez and real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the movie), Dylan began pulling events directly from news coverage and turning them into songs that captured the zeitgeist of the times.
It’s hard to underscore how important these compositions were to those fighting on the front lines of the freedom struggle down south, particularly “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
When Dylan and Seeger visited Greenwood, Miss., in the summer of 1963 to sing at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee rally in Laura McGhee’s cotton field, copies of the song’s lyrics were printed and distributed to the crowd. It was an anthem.
“‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ hit like a bombshell,” SNCC veteran Courtland Cox remembers. “It’s a very short, simple, but very profound song, even today. Even the opening line, ‘How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?’ I think that line itself would resonate with the people of Mississippi … The question of dignity is so important … That line, I’m sure, is the question that most male Mississippians who were Black asked themselves over the years.”
Dylan’s trip to Greenwood was his first visit to the region (an artist can only glean so much truth from the safety of Greenwich Village). Cox was there that day, having picked up Dylan and actor Theo Bikel at the Jackson airport the night before. SNCC veteran Frank Smith was also there, helping run power for the musicians’ microphones from the battery of an old truck. That morning, armed law enforcement officers put up No Parking signs along the road to deter people from attending, then watched from afar as buses brought in citizens from town anyway.
At the rally, Dylan debuted “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song about the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who’d been gunned down in his family’s driveway in Jackson, Miss., just three weeks earlier by a white segregationist (coincidentally, from Greenwood).
“He kind of reminded me a little bit of a white Bob Moses,” SNCC veteran Frank Smith remembers. “He looked like he was very shy. I don’t know if he was shy or if he was just, you know sometimes these artists, they go into a funk before they start performing, and maybe he was getting himself fresh before he performed that day. But he didn’t look … he didn’t look very healthy to me, personally. Some of that was probably the outdoor heat. Some of it was probably fear. There was fear in everybody, because these people were not used to seeing the high-powered rifles that were aimed at us from far away.”
Performing under threat of danger in the heart of Deep South was more than just some cheap publicity stunt; it was an act of courage for all involved. I wish it had been included in the film.
For those seeking an entry point into the Cult of Dylan, “A Complete Unknown” serves its purpose. Though several facts are manipulated to fit the time constraints of a feature film (the movie clocks in at 2 hours, 20 minutes), the arc of the story is accurate enough. It reintroduces a 60-year-old story to a new wider, younger audience and pours concrete on Dylan’s status as an enduring cultural icon (this was almost certainly Sony’s hope, seeing as they bought his entire musical catalog back in 2020 for some $250 million).
The plan appears to be working. The film has already grossed more than $50 million, and average monthly streams of Dylan’s music on Spotify are up more than a third from this time last year.
America is having a Bob Dylan moment, and so is the University of Mississippi.
This spring I’m teaching a class in the School of Journalism and New Media called “Bob Dylan and the South,” the university’s first course in a growing field of Dylan Studies. We have 25 students enrolled, with more on the waitlist, and they hail from more than a dozen different disciplines across the campus.
Despite his North Country Minnesota upbringing, Dylan has returned time and again to the terrains of the South for inspiration and exposition. The class will dig deeper into journalistic coverage of Dylan's civil rights work, his relationship with the media, and the various ways the South has influenced his writings (and vice-versa).
Ole Miss is a natural home for such a course. One of those songs Dylan ripped from the headlines back in 1962 was “Oxford Town,” which lampooned and called attention to the race riots surrounding James Meredith’s admission into the university that fall.
Fun Fact: The only time Dylan has ever performed that song live?
Oct. 25, 1990, right here at the Tad Smith Coliseum.
This is another thing “A Complete Unknown” does well: it reintroduces America to the Folk Revival movement of the first half of the 20th Century. Dylan didn't hitchhike to Greenwich Village in 1961 to become a rock star. That happens later. He came to New York because that’s where his idol Woody Guthrie was, along with the rest of the burgeoning folk scene.
Author and critic Michael Gray says American folk music falls broadly into four main categories: Yankee, Southern Poor White, Cowboy and Black.
Three of the four bubble up from the same realm as the Confederacy.
When Dylan shifts from acoustic to electric, he’s traveling the same sonic highway that links Robert Johnson with Muddy Waters.
When he writes about revisiting “Highway 61” in 1965, he’s referring to the main artery that runs from his native Minnesota all the way to New Orleans, cutting a path through the heart of Middle America and the Mississippi Delta. It’s the same highway Black sharecroppers used to escape Jim Crow and migrate north, too. There’s a reciprocity there, an understanding of the history and cultural significance simmering just beneath the surface.
These connections continue long after the time period depicted in “A Complete Unknown.” After recording two electrified albums in New York and plugging in at Newport, he flouts convention and heads south to Nashville, Tennessee–Music City USA–where he records his next three albums using “Nashville Cats” session musicians.
His late-1980s return-to-form album, “Oh Mercy”? Recorded in New Orleans.
His 2006 album “Modern Times”? Littered with intertextual references to Civil War-era poet and newspaperman Henry Timrod.
His latest album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways” (2020)? Named after a 1929 song by Mississippian Jimmie Rodgers, who was known as the “Father of Country Music.”
I could keep going, but all of this is what makes Bob Dylan such a fascinating subject for academic study. He purposefully acts as a skeleton key to all that came before. As the Nobel committee described it, he’s “created new poetic expressions” on top of what was once historical rubble.
Dylan may be from the North Country, but he’s a fine and welcomed guest at our southern table.
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R.J. Morgan is instructional associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, director of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.