So how did it feel? Bob Dylan’s early years in New York have been chronicled, dramatised, riffed on and pored over more than the Last Supper. James Mangold’s biopic – told very much with the backing, though not the guiding hand of Dylan Inc – somehow achieved the impossible: keeping the people with working knowledge of the musical rota at the Gaslight Cafe as interested as those with little more than an acquaintance with TikTok covers of Blowin’ in the Wind.
And that’s perhaps the key case for A Complete Unknown to win the best picture Oscar. Sure, it’s an excellent movie with a hair-raising performance from its lead, but I think the reason so many younger or non-Dylan fans enjoyed it is, curiously, its capturing of the notion that one man’s art can give people hope for change. The fact that the film itself is very specifically about Dylan rejecting that position is neither here nor there.
