On the night of Sunday, July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. He played a Fender electric guitar, and he was backed, for the first time onstage, by an amplified rock ’n’ roll band. They performed three songs. Chaos ensued.
That much everyone can agree on. For almost 60 years, though, the details of this cataclysmic concert have been endlessly analyzed and debated. A depiction of these events makes up the climax of the new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” with Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. The film recreates the Newport show complete with deafening boos, objects being hurled at the stage, and fury from the folk music establishment like festival board members Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist.
Dylan recently tweeted that Newport was a “fiasco” (yes, he’s tweeting now), but those 20 minutes became one of rock’s most legendary moments. “Dylan going electric” remains universal shorthand for artists pursuing their own musical path, bravely defying the expectations of their audience regardless of consequence.
“The remarkable thing about that weekend,” said Joe Boyd, who was the production manager at Newport in 1965, “was that so many big historical events become hinges of history in retrospect, but this was one of those events that everybody saw coming and everybody was alert to and conscious of as it was happening.”
The set has been represented on film before — in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, “No Direction Home,” and Murray Lerner’s two chronicles of Newport, “Festival” (1967) and the Dylan-specific “The Other Side of the Mirror” (2007). In Todd Haynes’s 2007 Dylan meditation, “I’m Not There,” the singer (in this scene played by Cate Blanchett) and his musicians take the stage, open their instrument cases, pull out machine guns and fire on the crowd.
The portrayal of Newport in “A Complete Unknown” (which is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties”) plays fast and loose with the timeline but gets across the sense of pandemonium and conflict.
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