Every Moment Has A Song

(via WETA) by James Jacobs

I recently saw A Complete Unknown. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite artists, and I actually got to meet and work with Pete Seeger (in fact I visited his log cabin that Dylan spends the night in early in the film, and I can attest that they got those details right) so I was excited to see those two icons acknowledged in our current popular culture and introduced to a new generation. Judging from reactions to the film on social media, the movie was a resounding success on that front (though Joan Baez seems to be the artist depicted in the film who’s really resonating with the younger generation.)  

There is no such thing as a perfect biopic that will satisfy both the people who know the history going in and those for whom the film acts as an introduction to the subject. I knew the film would take liberties, and that my reaction would be colored by my own feeling of connection to the period and milieu it depicts. The movie opens in 1961, the year Dylan arrived in New York at age 19, and also the year I was born on Long Island approximately 35 miles east of Greenwich Village. 31 years later I moved to New York and I played at some of the same clubs Dylan played in and got to meet icons like Pete, and Alan Lomax, and Theodore Bikel. I figured that’s the world I would be obsessed with upon exiting the film. 

But instead I left the film thinking about another artist I am obsessed with but had never previously associated with this universe: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 

Actually I thought about TWO Mozarts: the real one and the one dreamed up by the demented Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play and screenplay Amadeus.  

Both Amadeus and A Complete Unknown are about immature genius savants who produce art that contains a deep well of wisdom and humanity completely lacking in their social personalities. The main characters are almost supporting players in their own stories, because what they’re really about are the people who try to connect with them but just can’t make sense of the profound disconnect between the sublime music and the selfish brats that produced it.  

Bob Dylan’s journey from provincial Minnesota to exciting New York is remarkably similar to Mozart’s escaping Salzburg for Vienna. They were both young, hungry, probably on the neurodivergent spectrum, had a justified confidence in their own abilities that made them both impatient with those who didn’t “get” them and distrustful of those who did, craving attention but unwilling to follow the established protocols necessary to cultivate their reputation and status within the industry – though they intuited that their rebelliousness actually helped their celebrity status even as it aggravated those managing their careers…

Read more: https://weta.org/fm/classical-score/mozart-meets-bob-dylan-amadeus-vs-complete-unknown