Warning: SPOILERS ahead for A Complete Unknown!James Mangold’s new biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, charts the singer’s rise from a fledgling folk singer inspired by the musical traditions of Woody Guthrie to a full-blown rock superstar. With the instruments to match, naturally, A Complete Unknown‘s soundtrack is memorable. The movie plays heavily on the mythology surrounding Dylan’s visit to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital as a 20-year-old, where he found his hero Guthrie incapacitated by Huntington’s disease. According to A Complete Unknown, Guthrie then gave his harmonica to Dylan, only for the young singer to return with it four years later.
The film shows folk legend Pete Seeger also visiting the hospital as Dylan plays his “Song to Woody”, a tribute he wrote for Guthrie and his first song of any significance, upon first meeting his idol. The youngster certainly earns his stripes, and before long he’s using his new mouth organ to thrill audiences with his own brand of folk music at the coffeehouses of New York’s Greenwich Village. By the end of the movie, however, we see a whole different Bob Dylan, playing a whole different kind of music.
Bob Dylan Returns Woody Guthrie’s Harmonica Due To His Music’s Evolution
He No Longer Takes Guthrie’s American Folk Tradition As His Musical Starting Point
Just as A Complete Unknown begins with Dylan meeting Woody Guthrie and then receiving the gift of his hero’s harmonica as a mark of approval, A Complete Unknown ends with him trying to give the instrument back. Things appear to have come full circle, except that a post-Newport Folk Festival Bob Dylan is now 24 and in his electrifying pomp, having left behind legions of folk traditionalists – including Seeger – in a dramatic turn towards amped-up blues and folk rock.
The man who first inspired Dylan to travel to New York was no longer of any use to him musically. As Dylan himself stated in his 2008 interview with Scott Emmerman for Hohner USA, it was Guthrie’s “approach” the artist was imitating by playing the harmonica simultaneously with the guitar using a rack. Therefore, it was Guthrie’s instrument that he no longer needed when he turned his back on acoustic folk music.
The harmonica “rack” refers to a metal or plastic attachment consisting of wires holding up each end of the instrument and a strap that goes around the back of the player’s neck, allowing them to play it without using their hands.
Did Bob Dylan Give Woody Guthrie’s Harmonica Back To Him In Real Life?
Guthrie Didn’t Give It To Him In The First Place
Custom Image by Milica Djordjevic
It’s true that Dylan visited Guthrie in Greystone Park in 1961, but the way it happens in A Complete Unknown’s opening scene is entirely fictionalized. Pete Seeger wasn’t there, Dylan didn’t play “Song to Woody” (a composition that actually resulted from the visit), and he was never gifted a harmonica. He was gifted a guitar by Johnny Cash, though, as confirmed in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home (a great Bob Dylan movie to watch before A Complete Unknown). Since he never received Guthrie’s harmonica in the first place, there was no need for a further visit to try and give it back.
Rather than aiming to depict Dylan’s real-life meetings with Guthrie literally, the movie uses the older folk singer’s harmonica as a motif to reflect the evolution in Dylan’s figurative relationship with Guthrie’s story and musical tradition. Guthrie refusing to take the harmonica back and insisting it belongs to Dylan is A Complete Unknown’s metaphorical representation of a further evolution that took place in Dylan’s relationship with his own music. By the time of Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding, instead of rejecting folk music altogether, he’d accepted it as an integral part of his artistic makeup, harmonica and all.
A Complete Unknown is a biographical movie that follows a young Bob Dylan as he integrates with New York and catches the eye of the folk singers in the area, eventually propelling him into stardom.
- Release Date
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December 25, 2024
- Runtime
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140 minutes
- Character(s)
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Bob Dylan
, Pete Seeger
, Sylvie Russo
, Joan Baez
, Alan Lomax
, Johnny Cash
, Harold Levanthal
, Woody Guthrie
, Albert Grossman
, Bob Neuwirth
, Al Kooper
, Stage Manager
