Rediscovering Dylan through a Complete Unknown
Last night I watched A Complete Unknown, the new film about Bob Dylan's life, and it reminded me why his music still feels so singular and alive.
I first discovered Dylan at seventeen. I had grown up on a steady rotation of Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, The Beatles, Supertramp and Bowie, all carefully chosen by my parents, yet Dylan was never part of that soundtrack. I found him through a girlfriend, and his songs felt like discovering a new colour, something I had never encountered before yet instantly recognised as essential. I was hooked then and remain so now.
My gateway was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which still feels like an album that breathes every time you play it. The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Desire soon followed, and each became a kind of compass for how words, melody and truth can come together to create something quietly defiant. They are lessons in storytelling and soul, still capable of stopping you mid-thought decades later.
Why it still matters
What struck me most about the film is how completely Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s essence. The voice, the look, the rhythm of his movements, the unpredictable shift between shyness and certainty. It never slips into impersonation. It feels inhabited, as if he has found a way to live inside Dylan’s restless mind for a while. You can almost see the ideas forming before the words emerge, as if he is searching for the exact phrasing that will set him free.
Watching that process unfold is a reminder that before GenAI, before algorithms, before “content” became something to produce and measure, there was simply a young man with a guitar, a typewriter and an unfiltered need to make sense of the world. Dylan’s anti-war and social justice lyrics still move me, not because they are sentimental, but because they are honest and unflinching, written with empathy and anger in equal measure.
Listen to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and then read the story behind it, or sit with Masters of War and notice how bare truth sounds when it is stripped of decoration. These songs do not age because they were never about fashion or form. They were about holding up a mirror and asking who we really are.
In a world increasingly shaped by generative AI, Dylan stands as a reminder of something worth protecting. True creativity does not emerge from data or from perfectly engineered prompts. It comes from experience, from doubt and obsession, from heartbreak and protest, and from the courage to say something that might matter.
The tools around us will keep changing, and they can serve us well, but they will never replace the messy, imperfect, emotional truth that gives real art its power. Dylan had a guitar, and that was enough.