If you have surfed the Internet anytime over the past four months, you know it has been difficult to avoid Timothee Chalamet. He’s appeared on the podcasts of influencers Theo Vonn, Zane Lowe, and Brittany Broski. He undertook “double duty” on Saturday Night Live, making him one of just 42 talents to both host and perform in the show’s 50-year history. He comically arrived at a London movie premiere on a Lime bike, which landed him a $73 fine and TikTok stardom.
As erratic as these events may seem, there’s a strategy behind them. Chalamet’s portrayal of Bob Dylan in the biopic A Complete Unknown earned him a ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the upcoming 97th Academy Awards. Winning would make him the youngest star to be awarded Best Actor, so Chalamet is intensely campaigning for that Oscar. And honestly, he deserves it.
Chalamet spent five years preparing to play Dylan. He gained twenty pounds, worked with a vocal and harmonica coach, and sang all the songs featured in the movie live in the studio. Chalamet’s impressive dedication, intriguing press tour, and alluring star appeal draw people to the theatre, but his bone-chilling performance leaves audiences in awe of Dylan.
A Complete Unknown, which is based on Elijah Wood’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! and up for a total of eight Oscars, chronicles Dylan’s rise to fame and transition from folk to rock music in the early 60s. The film is appropriately titled, as Dylan and the sociopolitical landscape of the cinematic world are both ever-changing.
It opens with Dylan hitching a ride to New York, where folk legends Woody Gutherie (Scott McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) are incriminated of being members of the American Communist Party for their pro-union and anti-fascist songs during the McCarthy Trials. After wooing them with “Song to Woody,” a heartfelt ode to Gutherie, Dylan adopts Gutherie and Seeger as his mentors in becoming the new face of folk.
Seeger dreams of universally spreading the love, peace, and unity folk music diffuses, and Dylan appears to be the outlet to do just that. However, Dylan detests being boxed into a genre. Upon initially meeting him, Seeger questions if Dylan is a definitive folk musician. Dylan (in his typical fashion) responds with a vague, defiant response, making it clear his career and ambitions have no concrete projections.
This small tiff in the first fifteen minutes foreshadows the culmination tension of the movie. As the years progress, Dylan’s sound becomes more experimental. He shifts from covering historic folk songs to writing heart-swelling originals to performing political anthems at the March on Washington.
“Dylan understands music wields a power most art forms do not: accessibility. People can choose not to engage with the news, but music is difficult to avoid and easy to understand.”
However, the appeal of fame seems to pull Dylan away from his humble origins. Halfway through the movie, Dylan refuses to play his biggest hit, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” while touring with his fellow folk icon and ‘situationship’ Joan Baez. He tells the disgruntled crowd he needs to stick to the setlist, but Baez defends the crowd. She reminds him people paid to hear the songs they like, not to see him.
This is where we see Dylan begin to “sell out.” He essentially abandons folk’s stripped, acoustic sound by experimenting with electric guitars, drums, and church organs in songs like “Highway 61 Revisited.” His manager (Dan Folger) urges him to stick to folk music because that is where his fanbase is grounded, so his artistic responsibility is to abide by them and their tastes. Dylan being the contrarian he is, this challenge only further ignites the rock ‘n’ roll fire underneath him.
In the film’s finale, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival organizers attempt to convince Dylan not to play songs from his new record, which is heavily rock-inspired. Instead, they want him to stick to his roots and give the crowd what they came for: good ole folk music. To the organizers’ dismay, he instead kicks off his set with a performance of “Maggie’s Farm,” a fast-tempo, repetitive dance song. Fans scream Judas! and throw food on stage. Fist-fights break out. The kind, gentle Seeger nearly takes an axe to the aux cords. Dylan’s electricity is execrated.
While Dylan’s authenticity is admirable, the crowd’s upset is not unprovoked. His traditional folk songs like “Girl From The North Country,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” steal America’s heart, but his politics cement him as an icon. Critically, Rolling Stone ranks “Masters of War” as the 6th best protest song of all time. Cinematically, Chalamet’s rendition of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” moves the fictional audience to a standing ovation and the theatrical audience to tears.
Dylan understands music wields a power most art forms do not: accessibility. People can choose not to engage with the news, but music is difficult to avoid and easy to understand. Written after the death of RFK, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” hopefully and urgently calls upon politicians and older generations to adapt their old ways of thinking to the modern world (“And you better start swimmin’ / Or you’ll sink like a stone / For the times they are a-changin’”). His explicit demand for change is goosebump-inducing and respect-stipulating since the song provided millions with hope in a desolate time.
However, it’s Dylan’s lyrics that establish him as the influential legend he is — not his genre. His critics in the movie argue rock music to be senseless and frivolous, whereas folk is genuine and impactful. This outdated perspective overlooks the impact Dylan could have had if he transferred the political themes of folk music to rock music.
Take Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, for example. Prior to 2024, Beyoncé’s music pertained to R&B and rap. Black musicians dominate these genres and use their music to confront systemic racism and poverty, e.g. Childish Gambino’s “This is America” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank).” Beyoncé was no exception. Her album Lemonade (2016) embraces Black culture and empowers Black femininity. However, she defied these unspoken thematic genre rules with the release of Cowboy Carter, which earned Beyoncé her first Album of the Year award at the 2025 Grammys.
Cowboy Carter signifies Beyoncé’s transition to country music, a historically conservative and white genre. This crossover resembles the one Dylan underwent in A Complete Unknown, but instead of conforming to country’s superficial themes, Beyoncé retains her racial and gender-elevating lyricism to assert her place as a Black woman in the genre.
In “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”, she asks the audience, “Can we stand for somethin’? / Now is the time to face the wind.” This lyric parallels Dylan’s direct calls for change in songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin,’”, but unlike Dylan, Beyoncé challenges a new audience. Most folk listeners in the 60s adopted progressive viewpoints because folk songs commonly addressed environmental issues and communal rhetoric. On the contrary, country music’s exclusive history causes the genre to avoid political dialogue. Thus, Beyoncé’s divergence from rap to country music is more audacious and reputable than Dylan’s switch from folk to rock because she aims to reach a stereotypically ignorant market with a reformative message. She pushes boundaries Dylan did not dare to go near.
Dylan’s folk era laid the groundwork for many political artists and popularized protest songs, which influence music today, but if he had followed Beyoncé’s footsteps and hung onto his poignant lyricism, his genre-bend to rock music would not have been controversial; it would have been remarkable. His advocacy for peace and justice would have reached the masses, which had the power to change history.
Despite Dylan’s lack of political consistency, both A Complete Unknown and Cowboy Carter beautifully illustrate how art is a revolutionary tool. Music fosters empathy and allows people to form their own opinions of the world around them. In a time of political hostility and division, America is in desperate need of unity, and music is the clearest stream to people’s consciousness. Therefore, we must depend on artists now more than ever to utilize their talents to protest the authoritarian politics currently suffocating America. After all, the sticker on Dylan’s guitar says it best: “This machine kills fascists.”