Last December, my classmates and I had the privilege of attending the Boston premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet.
We had just spent an entire semester in “Bob Dylan: The Classic” exploring the man, myth, and legend. True to its name, the course was housed in the Classics department and taught by beloved Harvard professor and world-renowned Dylan scholar Richard Thomas—an icon in his own right, as many of us came to realize. Although the course had been offered before as a first-year seminar, this was the first time it had been open to students in other years. The timing was uncanny: the semester I took this class happened to coincide with the release of a major Hollywood adaptation of Dylan’s story.
As our class filed into the theater for the early screening, our expectations were low. How could Hollywood do justice to a figure we had barely scratched the surface of after months of rigorous academic study? We analyzed Dylan’s roots, influences, cultural context, and social impact. Despite intensive scholarship, many aspects of Dylan remained elusive. The more we studied, the more layers of ambiguity we seemed to uncover. To us, a Hollywood biopic could never capture the depth of someone we spent months struggling to parse.
However, alongside most of my classmates, I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I did not expect to be captivated by its storytelling whatsoever—let alone impressed by the portrait it painted of Dylan.
“A Complete Unknown” encapsulates Dylan’s socially awkward, intense, self-conscious presence, highlighting his peculiarities as an individual while portraying his ascent from an unknown folk singer to a defiant folk star gone rogue with the electric guitar. At the same time, it conveys the almost mystical quality of a genius channeling something beyond himself—delivering messages that articulated the cultural consciousness of a generation and continue to reverberate today.
Yet, while our class left the theater enthused and enlivened, reactions from Hollywood have been more divided. Some hail the film for its acting performances, direction, and musical integration, while others critique its narrative depth and historical fidelity, dismissing it as a “conventional Hollywood biopic”—one that manipulates timelines and characters to compress a complex reality into a limited narrative film of only 141 minutes. Ironically, in “The New Yorker,” Richard Brody wrote that the film “offers answers that range from empty to artificial.” The very idea that any biopic should provide “answers” struck me as odd—as if a life story is some kind of murder mystery with a definitive resolution.
Who goes into a movie called “A Complete Unknown” and expects clear-cut answers? The film never claims to provide them. If anything, it left only vague questions entirely up to interpretation. This openness was precisely what I believe helped the film feel authentic to Dylan’s legacy. It captured an essence, rather than a pre-analyzed understanding of Dylan with conclusions carved out for us.
The biopic inspired lively and rich discussions back on campus, with my fellow Dylan aficionados voicing different theories, curious observations, and new questions they’d walked away with. This matched the course, as every day of our class inspired more questions than it answered.
Studying Dylan through an academic lens deepened my appreciation for the artist, even as it amplified feelings of uncertainty and perplexity. This is part of what made the course so compelling: the deeper we got, the more mysteries and contradictions seemed to surface. Dylan’s legacy appeared to lie less in answering questions than in expanding the space in which they can exist. Meaning is not found in finality but in the openness of interpretation—the refusal to let a single definition dictate an entire reality.
The mindset of demanding perfect cohesion and meticulousness not only feels unnatural but also discourages creative minds from contributing priceless, inevitably ‘incomplete’ works. No single piece of art can encapsulate every insight, answer, or question. Not everyone mirrors Dylan’s audacity to turn up an amp in the face of boos. For every loud rebel, there are softer voices—no less brilliant—who might self-censor rather than confront controversy. Some, when faced with the risk of having their labor of love dismissed as inadequate, might prioritize acceptance over raw authenticity in their creative endeavors. And yet, perhaps their imperfect, genuine message was exactly what was meant to reach someone. The goal of communicating through art is less comprehension than it is connection.
By the semester’s end, I had a sense of Dylan’s guarded, enigmatic persona—one that seemed deliberately designed to evade labels or any attempts to pin him down.
Dylan was not a simple man, nor was his work’s literary and historical value. Hence, the Nobel Prize Committee made him the first musician in history to be awarded in Literature—for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
But to intellectualize Dylan’s work as purely an academic or literary achievement risks missing another fundamental truth: some minds, like Dylan’s, do not conform to the rigid structures we impose on understanding. Instead, they channel something untamed, something closer to the divine—a creative force that moves beyond rational categorization. So much exists beyond our perception, slipping through the cracks of language—some truths seem content to keep moving, unbothered by the constriction of computing minds. Dylan’s songs move people tremendously without total understanding, undermining the paradigm of intellectualism’s supremacy over intuition.
Any Dylan fan has likely seen some archival footage of his interviews from his early rise to fame, where he was comically evasive, sometimes even hostile, toward the press and fans trying to describe, understand, or in any way box in his art. He often responded to questions with sarcasm, counter-questions, or completely nonsensical answers.
One of my favorite, easily missable, but subtly electric moments in the film came from what was essentially a fluke—Al Kooper on organ. Kooper wasn’t supposed to play the organ. He had shown up expecting to play guitar, only for Dylan to shut him down on the spot: we already have the best guitarist. Most people would take that as their cue to pack it up and leave, but Kooper wasn’t most people. Determined to be part of the session, he scanned the room, spotted the organ, and—despite never having played one before—decided he’d figure it out on the fly. He didn’t even know what key the song was in—someone had to switch it for him mid-take. And yet, somehow, that improvisation became legendary. His playing on “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Queen Jane Approximately” is so embedded in Dylan’s sound from that era that I’d always assumed he’d been hired for it specifically. That it was pure chance and sheer nerve made it even more remarkable. It was one of those moments that perfectly captured the spirit of the era: improvisation, creative risk-taking, and the right kind of delusional confidence that turns accidents into history.
I considered the movie a resounding success. Despite the constraints of a biopic, the film distilled Dylan’s idiosyncratic mix of aloofness, supercilious wit, and unequivocal brilliance. It resonated across generations, from those who grew up with Dylan to younger audiences unfamiliar with the ethos of the 1960s-70s.
It’s standard artistic practice to convey the essence of a story through feeling rather than strict factual accuracy—something Dylan himself, known for spinning tales, understood well. We know this as consumers. For comprehensive historical precision, we know to watch a documentary. For an artistic rendering of a legend, we turn to a Hollywood adaptation.
As our class imprinted upon me, Dylan was and is a phenomenon—one that people witness, feel, and interpret rather than fully understand. The need for definitive “answers” misses the point of getting lost in the traveling circus of Dylan’s rich mind. Throughout his career, Dylan has been a multidimensional figure with a contrarian attitude, resisting definitions of his work and identity—choosing instead to drift through the vast and vague.
The film honored this by refusing to impose artificial clarity on a person who, in real life, characteristically defies explanation.
I commend “A Complete Unknown” for not seeking to provide neatly packaged explanations or make silly attempts to unravel a poet and performer whose very essence is built on adamant mystery, multiplicity, and constant reinvention. Instead, the film immersed us in Dylan’s legend, allowing us to bear witness to his contradictions. It left us pondering, just as Dylan would prefer. He even shocked people by tweeting an endorsement of the film: this coming from a man who did not attend his own Nobel Prize award ceremony.
When intellectuals like Dylan subvert the assumption that knowledge is best measured by the accumulation of facts rather than spiritual or creative intelligence, they challenge our compulsion to make sense of life in perfectly cogent terms. Perhaps this is why Dylan continues to intrigue, confound, and inspire—he reminds us that understanding does not require mastery. Meaning is often found in what evades definition. Sometimes, the wisest thing we can do is learn to sit with the unknown.
Lulu Troyer ’26 (lulutroyer@college.harvard.edu) wrote this article while listening to Bob Dylan’s “Precious Angel,” “Stuck Inside a Mobile Home,” and “Positively 4th Street” on loop.