A Bob Dylan stan weighs in on A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, not Finn
Manchester club hero Finn, who happens to be a qualified Dylanologist, gives his unfiltered opinion on Timothée’s Oscar-nominated performance – and shares some advice for those of you who can’t name five Dylan songs off the top of your head.
Culture
Words: Jade Wickes
A few months ago, during an interview with beloved Manchester DJ/producer/label boss/promoter/NTS host Finn, we discovered something integral to his personality: an enduring obsession with Bob Dylan, passed down to him by his dad. “When I was younger, he played Dylan constantly,” Finn explains. “My uncle once broke one of his records and had to leave the house for three days.
“When you’re young, you kick back against what your dad’s got on in the house. Me and my brother would be like, ‘Turn it off, he can’t fucking sing!’ Just dickhead kids.”
But when Finn was 19 and studying abroad in San Francisco, he had the option to take a Bob Dylan module as taught by one of the world’s leading Dylan scholars. It was too good a chance to pass up.
“The guy [teaching us] was so fucking engaging,” Finn says. “He’d read us sections of Dylan’s biography – who lies about everything, by the way – and go, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this man is a total liar!’ That was the whole course. He made us listen to every album back to back and we had to write an essay on each one. You can’t do that and not develop a real love for the artist.” Was his dad chuffed when he came home converted? “Yeah. My mum was really fucking annoyed, though.”
When A Complete Unknown hit UK cinemas, we knew what we had to do: ask Finn all about it, from Timothée Chalamet’s bonkers press run to tips on wading into such an overwhelmingly large body of work as Dylan’s. Lucky for you, Finn was ready to talk. No spoilers ahead, so dig in.
Rumour has it you went to see A Complete Unknown with your dad on Friday. Tell us everything.
I sort of enjoyed it. The more I think about it, the less I like it. I don’t want to be too hard on it, but I don’t think it’s really for me. It’s a really, really big dramatisation. They take a lot of liberties – it feels a bit like a movie first and a historical account second.
What was it that irked you?
The thing I found the most objectionable was that they really shrink Dylan’s involvement in the civil rights movement and how political some of his songs were outside of a folk context. The movie is essentially about Dylan leaving the folk movement. He was an acoustic folk singer, that was his audience, and then he decided he wanted to go electric. Those are the bounds of the movie. They gesture towards his songs having a political impact – there’s a scene where they show Dylan performing at the 1963 March on Washington, on a TV screen, like a footnote. He was on before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech! But that wasn’t an important thing in his career, no. The more important thing was picking up an electric guitar! As soon as that happened, it all felt a bit silly. If you’re going to make a movie about the 1960s in 2025, I don’t know why you’d skip past that stuff. That annoyed me a little bit. But, obviously, I’ve never made a Hollywood film.
So it’s a Bob Dylan film that’s not for Bob Dylan fans?
Potentially. I’m not in with the Bob Dylan fandom podcast world.
Don’t lie.
Okay, I am a little bit. I think people broadly like A Complete Unknown because it does capture how electrifying some of those songs were. It captures Dylan’s songwriting and the effect it had on people, that’s quite artfully done. The movie understands that these are watershed records. When [Timothée] played Like a Rolling Stone, I couldn’t stop grinning. The movie shares a love for the music, so in that sense, I did enjoy it. And me and my dad had a really good time sitting in the car after the film and going through everything we thought was wrong with it. It was nice to be total dickheads about the whole thing.
“When [Timmy] first got cast I was like, he’s too pretty to play Dylan. Dylan is like, constantly getting dumped – Chalamet has clearly never been dumped in his life. But he’s really, really good”
What did you make of Timmy’s performance, press tour, everything surrounding this film, really?
I’m intensely jealous of Chalamet because he got to work with Bob Dylan and he’s the same age as me. It’s not fair, it should’ve been me. When he first got cast I was like, he’s too pretty to play Dylan. Dylan is like, constantly getting dumped – Chalamet has clearly never been dumped in his life. But he’s really, really good. Then he went on the red carpet in the wig and the crazy outfit, referencing Dylan at Sundance in 2003. Dylan’s had several failed Hollywood films, you see. When he did that, I was like, okay, this guy’s a true believer. One of us, one of us! I am pro-Timothée Chalamet. He’s refreshingly up for it. He’s got the spirit of Tom Cruise in him.
One of the defining moments of Bob Dylan’s foray into “going electric” took place in 1966, when he was playing a gig at Manchester Trade Hall. Infamously, a fan shouted “Judas!” at him, which has since become a key piece of Dylan lore. In A Complete Unknown, this moment happens at the Newport Folk Festival. How do you feel about the Manchester erasure in that scene?
Haha, I had a draft tweet about this. The movie should have premiered in Manchester, as the North’s ignorant and reactionary crowd behaviour played a central role in building the Dylan electric mythos. It’s our story too. Yes, [we were] absolutely robbed.
There also aren’t many drugs in the film, which a lot of people took issue with.
That was actually one of the things my dad said: where are the drugs? I don’t know if you can really make an honest movie about the 1960s without everyone taking drugs. Dylan wasn’t just a tortured artist, he also loved to party.
What advice would you have for beginners who appreciate Bob Dylan as an important cultural figure, but haven’t actually listened to his music?
A couple of years ago, some of my mates asked me this. I started a sort of Bob Dylan university on WhatsApp. We all listened to one album a week and reported back. I now have friends who are Dylan fans as a result, so that’s a good way to start – just listening through the albums together. I think Dylan has a reputation as a really wordy, beat poet kind of songwriter, and the movie captures a lot of that era. Then there’s his outwardly political work, which is really moving but obviously dated. On the run after Blonde on Blonde (1966), he does John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969). Then he’s got New Morning (1970), Blood on the Tracks (1975). These all have political songs to a degree, but there are also beautiful love songs in there. I think people underestimate just how good he is at writing big pop songs. He is an accessible songwriter. There’s this dusty 1960s persona that doesn’t do him any favours. So for me, start with Nashville Skyline. That’s my current favourite. Really simple, gorgeous love songs. Any other Dylan fan will tell you that’s completely wrong, I’m sure.
“Dylan’s favourite item of clothing is the hoodie. He wears them constantly. When he’s on tour, he’s always got a hoodie on backstage. He looks like a millennial”
What’s your favourite Dylan fact?
Someone asked me this the other day! It’s like when the queen died – I’d been talking about it for ages. Then she actually died and my phone exploded. I’ve been talking about Dylan for years and now he’s got a biopic. Anyway, Dylan’s favourite item of clothing is the hoodie. He wears them constantly. When he’s on tour, he’s always got a hoodie on backstage. He looks like a millennial. He contains multitudes. And he really is just like me, because I always wear hoodies as well.
I like that he’s just joined Twitter, too. His social media has always been managed but on Twitter it really is just him. He tweets about eating at a restaurant and really enjoying it and if you’re in New Orleans you should go check it out. Real boomer behaviour. It’s semi-surreal. I’ve got an alert set up so that each time Dylan tweets it pings my phone straight away. Some woman tweeted that she was fired off working with Dylan on an SNL show because she looked him in the eye. He tweeted her saying that he would never do that, and “next time you see me, look me straight in the eye.” I was like, okay, that’s good stuff.
He’s had enough of expressing himself in this incredibly artistic and poetic manner.
Exactly. He tweeted that he went to a book fair to look for a book he liked but couldn’t find it. Then you start reading into it: what’s he trying to say?! Or maybe he’s just saying shit on the internet. He’s a true poster, in that sense. He is an enigma and genuinely a weird person. All the stuff people have been writing about David Lynch this week and how he never explained himself, and as a result everyone feels that his work is accessible because there’s no official interpretation – I think that’s what Dylan’s got going on, too. No one really knows who he is. Anyway, there you go, one of my three specialist subjects: early ’90s UK garage, Bob Dylan and what happens in the event of a British monarch dying. There probably won’t be another monarch death for a while, so I should probably find a new third. I need to go chase the zeitgeist.
