It took me two days to figure out whether or not I liked the new Bob Dylan movie.  I didn’t. And not because it isn’t a solid, well made film.  It is. Hell, twelve years ago, it might have been acclaimed as great.  But because we are at the dawn of Trump’s second term, “A Complete Unknown” is a piece of shit.  

Now I when say piece of shit, I am being literal.    ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a lump of pre-consumed matter that looks like yummy yummy fudge.  Nothing in this film is original or untried: the plot, the narrative structure, the method which it is told, even the actors are safe and bankable pieces of candy.   Everything is post-digested, audience tested and completely safe.

It’s a very attractive movie.

The Halo effect is a psychological term which describes how folks ascribe positive attributes based on a general impression; pretty people seem nicer.  We do this with artists.  Great and amazing artists are assumed to be great and amazing in everything they do.  They’re not.   Quite often they are total assholes in everything but their art.  Or worse, they are completely and totally normal.  Bland.  Everyday.  Their shit stinks just like everyone else’s.   

And that is the quality of Stench that arises from this movie.  ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a visual painting about the History of All of Us trying to make a History of Bob Dylan.  And in the end, there is none.   There’s an old saying in comedy, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then it’s a duck.   If after a half century of making art, if Bob Dylan still has nothing to say, even in his biopic that he approved, then the man has nothing to say.    

It took me a while to realize that the character of Bob Dylan never says a single word about any of the issues of his time.   We see Pete Segar in court defending the music of  Woody Guthrie to a Conservative political establishment, but Mr. Zimmerman never speaks a syllable about any of the numerous political and social issues of the time.   Dylan is historically famous for this quietude, and it is a huge problem in a biography when you don’t know what the subject of your biography is thinking. The film makers solve this problem by using the ‘Walk Hard’ Narrative formula that can turn a drunken idiot into a nobly suffering laconic hero.  The use of black characters in the narrative typifies this.   We see Bob bravely dating a Hip looking black chick, but the only other black character in the movie is a fictional bluesman.  A man surrounded by folk musicians in 1964 and a not a single word about Civil Rights?    It proves that every character and plot point about this movie, is nothing but a tool to make Bob Dylan….well, cool.  

Yeah, cool.  ‘A Complete Unknown’ turns Robert Zimmerman into the goddamn Fonz.   An empty leather jacket that silently whacks machines to make them run properly.    An Icon that struts about, receiving acclaim from strangers who have never actually seen the Fonz fight.   He never did, you know.  The Fonz never threw a punch on a single episode of Happy Days.  And neither did Dylan.  

Dylan versus Corporate Music is the biggest lie in this movie.  Dylan is corporate music.  Dylan is establishment.  Dylan is Conservative.  Dylan is an Industry to himself.   Rebels don’t get Nobel Prizes, trusted servants do.    And even this movie doesn’t try to make the claim that Dylan gives a rat’s ass about politics or anything else other than making music.  And that is not okay with us.    We cannot let a person that makes things we love just be a person.   They have to be bigger than life, better than everything, super human.  

The truth is Bob Dylan is just a songwriter.  Not a prophet, not an angel, not a Folk Icon, not a rock God, he’s a guy who is great at writing songs.   And we, as desperate members of a dying civilization, want to pump him full of meaning and transcendence and all those other beautiful things that we want in our lives and cannot have because we can’t write Blowing In The Wind.  

And if we hadn’t just elected a known liar, criminal and rapist as president this movie might be just a well made film.  But because this movie lies, obfuscates, deceives and then makes money from this deception, just like our politicians, it is excrement.  Not simply un-needed, but a wasteful product of the uber-wasteful Age of Cool.  A flickering symbol of what we have let our society become; an empty leather jacket banging at old machines trying to make them work. 

In the end, I agree with what Bob Dylan’s silence about his own life seems to say: fuck Bob Dylan. And hey there Bob, if in 2025, you still don’t want to speak, all I can do is sing your own song back at you…..

PS—-Edward Norton is a total badass.