I finally watched the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and it’s interesting to see the clash of artists during this formative period in rock music.

The movie opens with Dylan arriving in Greenwich village, and a montage of him walking the streets with a guitar strapped to his back looking every bit like the icon we now know, but in reality, he’s totally unremarkable, wandering a bleak cityscape. He passes by a bum begging for change who also plays a guitar, no doubt a musical predecessor who also had big dreams. He stops in a bar full of other musicians who barely give him a second glance until he asks where Woody Guthrie can be found. So, guitar+Guthrie: they get who he is, and dismiss him with some curt directions.

Dylan’s acoustic guitar is his ticket to see his idol, and gain an audience with Pete Seeger. Dylan’s mastery of folk tropes gains him respect of the old guard, who recognize the future of their art form when they hear it. Dylan seems to exude authenticity in an art form that demands it, though he says, and does, very little when he’s not singing.

Pete Seeger demonstrates the magical artistry of folk music when he leads an untrained audience in a beautiful & haunting rendition of one of his songs, and the real magic of folk, of course, is how it raises social awareness & helps organize political movements. Art makes social responsibility beautiful.

Dylan gets this, and feels the power that moves his audience. His songs capture his generation’s feelings with cutting force, and the folk industry see another movement leader arising in their midst.

But something happens to his music as he develops his craft. He draws upon more than just folk tropes and news events, but from Shakespeare, the Bible, and cinema, in a way that becomes, like those art forms, more about the timeless personal journey of the artist.

Dylan’s actual journey as an artist is a closed book: literally. He carries a scrapbook of his earlier years which contradicts his story that he’s a colorful drifter. His bio and his name are fabrications. Yet the feeling he conveys in his music seems genuine. His fictions are convincing, but what happens if he tries to break free of them?

Once he’s a breakout hit, he can’t go anywhere without being mobbed. It’s difficult to be a spiritual leader of a movement if you’re chased down by the people when you’re trying to live your life. Dylan is without his guitar in these scenes, and without it, he seems to shrink to nothing; only the crowds define him.

His success is derived from his well-chosen imagery, beginning with that acoustic guitar, but it comes crashing down when he reaches for a different guitar. The music he sings to electric accompaniment, “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone”, are powerful ballads, but they’re not folk ballads. We can see what frustration powers them: being forced to serve another’s agenda, and being cast out if you try to reclaim your freedom are exactly what happened to him.

To be sure, these are themes just as universal as the subjects of folk music, but they express the frustration of the individual, on the individual’s own terms. You’ll never get an audience to chant these songs in unison, because they’re introspective, not unifying.

That said, had Dylan started out writing this kind of music, how far would he have gotten? Who would publish it? Perhaps folk music provided a good launching point for his themes, but he was never destined to stay there, to the chagrin of his original sponsors. My first album of his I bought was as a member of the fictional, whimsical Traveling Wilburys, which seemed to suit his style as well as anything else he’s done, a role to slip in and out of, its truth in the moment of performance, in a band that seems to have been everywhere, but gathers no moss.