In the wake of the recent release of the biopic A Complete Unknown, Timothy Hampton, author of Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work and Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History, writes on the film’s accuracy and depiction of the collective meaning behind the music of Dylan’s era. Click here to learn more about Hampton’s book on Dylan’s poetics. Click here to read the full essay in the Ideas Blog. An excerpt appears below:

“The current crisis of American democracy, Trump’s genius at turning us against each other, the arrogance of a gilded class that sails above us in their private planes—all of these big themes hover around A Complete Unknown. It’s a fable about the end of an ideal of American unity and optimism. About the failure of goodness. We might place it less in the history of biopics about genius than in a tradition of stories about communities that turn bad—García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, or Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.”