Bob Dylan
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The Communist Folk Singers Who Shaped Bob Dylan March 06, 2025
In 1960, a young Robert Zimmerman — who had begun to call himself “Bob Dylan” — journeyed from the icy flatlands of Minnesota to New Jersey on a pilgrimage. His destination: the bedside of his ailing idol, the legendary folk hero, Woody Guthrie. He w...
Bob Dylan’s Call to Freedom March 04, 2025
Bob Dylan is, as I have previously written for Law & Liberty, America’s “definitive post-war artist.” The new James Mangold movie, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan in the first part of his career, 1961–65, proves just...
When You Ain't Got Nothing February 26, 2025
Bob Dylan isn’t dead, but he may as well be. With a slate of books, think-pieces, and, now, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, we’ve condemned the man born Robert Zimmerman to a fate usually reserved for those already playing their great gig in the ...
Dylan’s Newport Performance Was a Great Political Drama February 24, 2025
Bob Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 was to become, in Clinton Heylin’s words, “the most written about performance in the history of rock.” And not without cause. Dylan’s clash with the constituency from which he’d emerg...
Bob Dylan and Me February 18, 2025
Very little of what the film A Complete Unknown portrays is true to history, starting with the opening scenes. It opens with a 19-year-old Bob Dylan arriving by car in New York City and quickly finding his way to Greenwich Village, where a random bea...
Mister Lonely February 10, 2025
Dylan hasn’t always been a legend. Or at least not consistently. Joan Baez, in her poison-pen love-letter ‘Diamonds and Rust’, sang that he burst on the scene ‘already’ one. Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he travelled east in January 1961 to mee...
Bob Dylan’s American Odyssey January 29, 2025
At times I think there are no wordsBut these to tell what’s trueAnd there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden—Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden”James Mangold’s new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, opens with Dylan’s arrival on New York’s Greenwich V...
America Has Lost Faith in Genius January 29, 2025
At one point in A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, Dylan’s girlfriend returns from a trip abroad to a lovely surprise. “Oh Bobby!” she says, beaming with pride: “Did you teach yourself how to make coffee?”It’s a funny moment because while ...
How Bob Dylan Fought the Proto-Woke January 14, 2025
The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true...
The Sordid Scene January 14, 2025
A thirty-something indie rocker gallantly holds the hair back for his much younger girlfriend as she rails a line of coke off the coffee table in the opening moments of Matthew Gasda’s gleeful, scathing play Dimes Square. The pair flirt, bicker, talk...
Bob Dylan Is Having a Moment. His No. 1 Hater Is Ready. January 13, 2025
At a recent showing of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of young women settled in to watch the delicately handsome Timothée Chalamet impersonate the singer.They barely noticed the 80-year-old man sitting next to them, ...
Art is Disagreement January 10, 2025
I'll admit it straight off: I don’t know how to write about Bob Dylan. It’s like being asked to write about the smell of your childhood home. Every awful, beautiful memory; every fear, desire, and promise; every premonition and uncertainty—it’s all t...
Bob Dylan’s Famous Moment in 'A Complete Unknown' January 07, 2025
It’s easy to make the mistake that a key scene in A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career, involved a mere disagreement about style and instrumentation. The scene depicts the famous moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival w...
Another Side of Bob Dylan, Who Is a Circle January 06, 2025
In viewing A Complete Unknown, I must admit to remaining mystified that rock biopics continue to get made at all in the wake of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the hysterically funny and tragically underseen 2007 parody of basically every rockstar bi...
The Truth About Dylan’s Fallout with Pete Seeger January 06, 2025
One of Bob Dylan’s greatest tricks, in a career full of them, is his endless provocation of academic charlatans, credulous journalists, and his army of Aspergerian superfans. Those opaque lyrics and infrequent interviews—full of tall and contradictor...
REVIEW: ‘A Complete Unknown’ January 06, 2025
Can you dislike Bob Dylan and like the new biopic about him? The answer is yes, because I did. The question is why. I will attempt to answer this question now, so pull up a chair, because this could take a while....
The Restless Ambition of ‘A Complete Unknown’ January 06, 2025
We ask a lot of our artists. They should be creatively free and spurned when they “sell out.” They should be authentic, but not when the authenticity curdles into self-indulgence. They should never repeat themselves but also never change, do exactly ...
Timothée Chalamet Does Dylan January 03, 2025
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown rests on three fairly safe assumptions about our culture. First, that many people enjoy conventional biopics. Second, that many people enjoy the actor Timothée Chalamet. And third, that many people buy into the idea...
Not a Complete Flop January 03, 2025
After seeing A Complete Unknown last Thursday night I was surprised I didn’t hate the film. Granted, my expectations were bottom-rung (and unless Searchlight Pictures and director James Mangold are figuring Bob Dylan (83) will croak soon and looking ...
Unmasked and Anonymous January 02, 2025
With James Mangold’s new film A Complete Unknown offering audiences the first conventional Hollywood biopic of Bob Dylan, now is a good time to revisit and reconsider Dylan’s own cinematic legacy. Although it stretches back some six decades, that leg...
Ghosts of Electricity December 31, 2024
I.Over the restless course of Bob Dylan’s six-decade-plus career, the 83-year-old singer-songwriter has adopted a different narrative persona for each successive stage of his personal and musical journey. There was the young protest singer of the ear...
Printing the Legend December 30, 2024
At last, the wait is over. Director James Mangold’s eagerly awaited Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown finally arrived in US theatres on Christmas Day, following special preview screenings at selected IMAX theatres earlier in December. Its release w...
'A Complete Unknown' Misses the Genius of Bob Dylan December 25, 2024
Greil Marcus opened his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s ironically titled 1970 covers album Self-Portrait with a not-so-rhetorical question: “What is this shit?” Marcus was writing not only as a scorned fan but also as a concerned citizen of the ...
Bob Dylan In The Movies December 25, 2024
Bob Dylan loves movies—his songwriting is filled with cinematic references ranging from Gregory Peck to Sophia Loren to Titanic—but it’s not always clear that movies love him back. Unlike music, in which his creative dominion is so overarching as to ...
The Push Pin Attitude December 23, 2024
On July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle in or around Woodstock, New York. Nobody called the police, so there was no official report of the accident, or even a press release—just a two-sentence item a few days later on page 30 of The New Yo...
