JW:  From The Nation magazine, This is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show, our holiday reading guide: my favorite books about Donald Trump.  But first, John Powers on the new Bob Dylan movie. That’s coming up, in a minute.

The ever-elusive Bob Dylan seems to be an unlikely candidate for a Hollywood biopic. For comment on the new movie, ‘A Complete Unknown,’ starring Timothée Chalamet as our hero, we turn to John Powers–he’s critic-at-large on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air with Terry Gross,’ where he has a weekly audience of millions. John, welcome back.

JP: Happy to be here, Jon.

JW: I have to say, I was skeptical about this movie before I saw it.  Dylan has always been a shape-shifter who has made an art out of pulling the rug out from under fans’ expectations, and regularly refuting the critics who thought they had him pegged. The idea of making a Hollywood biopic about him seemed absurd.  But I have to say, I loved this movie.  From the very beginning. What did you think?

JP:  I found it exceedingly enjoyable. I guess, as a critic, my job is to carp. But this is a film I think whose floor is that it’s very enjoyable, and parts are much higher than that, and if you really love it, you’ll think the ceiling is really high, especially the singing.  It’s not just he’s acting Dylan, he actually is singing the songs, and really well. It’s a good time at the movies, which in fact is an interesting thing to be in the case of a Bob Dylan biopic. Because Bob Dylan wasn’t always a good time–permanently difficult to deal with, made a point of being impossible to nail down, and the whole point of a biopic is to nail it down.

JW: The basic story here is Bob arrives in Greenwich Village in 1961, becomes a hero of the folk music scene, then becomes a superstar, goes electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, and is accused by his old fans of betrayal, of selling out. Let’s start with act one here, the folk scene, the early ‘60s: Woody Guthrie is dying in the hospital, Bob goes to see him and meets Pete Seeger, played perfectly by a fabulous Ed Norton. Pete is warm and welcoming to Bob, he appreciates his talent, his genius, and Bob is eager to join the folk scene. How is the folk scene portrayed here?

JP: It’s portrayed as naive but incredibly well-meaning, and politically conscious.  Our first view of Pete Seeger is that he is in trouble for politics, for singing ‘This Land is Your Land,’ I believe–that got him in trouble. What’s nice in it is that this was an era of communal feeling, and that one of the great things about the folk scene that’s easy to overlook now was a lot of politics was in it, that when they were hearing Dylan for the first time, they were wanting to embrace him, and then he did the thing that I think blew their minds, which is he began writing political folk songs better than theirs. That’s the first part, and it’s fun to watch it.

JW: Some of the folk songs here, I have to say, really got to me: there’s that one scene where Pete Seeger gets a whole auditorium full of people singing three-part harmony on ‘Wimoweh.’ I was in an auditorium where Pete did that when I was in high school, and it was unforgettable.  Maybe you had to be there.
And the one that really got me in this movie was Bob’s song, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’:

“Oh, where have you been my blue-eyed son?
Where have you been my darling young one?
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans…
where the executioner’s face is always well-hidden….
And I’ll tell it, and think it, and speak it, and breathe it…”

I’ve got to say that one gives me the chills right now, but maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking a little too much about the second coming of Donald Trump.

JP: One of the things when you watch this film is you realize–man, Bob Dylan wrote a lot of great songs. Even as he’s political in a certain moment, the words of many of those political songs he wrote are completely and utterly relevant now. Partly because he was less overt than lots of other people. He was poetic, so therefore the songs travel in history better than lots of others.

JW: Yes.  He was against what he later called ‘finger-pointing songs,’ and of course, he did write a few of those—‘’Masters of War’–they show him singing during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I think is a bit of artistic license there, but that’s a song that doesn’t really hold up very well.

JP:  He knew it. I think the tension in the film is the fact that there is this movement based around a certain kind of music, that he can do exceedingly well, and yet he’s a character who never wants to be trapped in one place for very long, and is a genius. Then at some point you don’t want to keep writing that song, because there’s just so much more to do—and that’s the whole drama of the film.

JW: And the drama of the film, the climactic moment of his moving on, comes at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965.  This is the conflict between, we are told, acoustic music and electric music, between purity and the market, and it is made so vivid by showing what it means to Bob through the songs he sings. And what he sings at the Newport Folk Festival is, “I ain’t going to work on Maggie’s farm no more.”  He’s announcing he is quitting the folk scene, and that he’s not going to work for Pete Seeger anymore. And then for his encore, they demand that he do an acoustic encore, and he sings, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Wow, was that true.

JP: It’s always talked about how the metaphor of him going electric is that he’s playing those instruments, which I think in the folk world, and in the political world, where electric instruments are the instruments of corporate culture, they’re mainstream corporate culture, and they don’t have the purity of the acoustic stuff.  He goes electric and they don’t like just the sound. 
But there’s also the problem that his words also go electric at this point. His songs are,
“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son,’
Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”
There’s a difference between that and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’  If you listen to those later songs, you often don’t know what they mean.  They are rich with ambiguity and emotions and thoughts, and you can’t parse them into politics.

JW: In The New York Times, critic Manohla Dargis called the movie “Enjoyable easy listening.” This really got me. I thought that was so wrong. ‘Hard Rain’ is not easy listening, and in a different way, neither is the bitter song that starts, “Once upon a time, you looked so fine.” But what did you think about Manohla’s judgment here?

JP: Well, she wasn’t saying the songs were easy listening, she was saying the movie is easy listening, which is that it takes the complicated things, in the way of all biopics, simplifies them into a mythologized version. And it’s a myth that I and you both like. And it’s a myth that Dylan will like. But Dylan had other myths that he was also doing. In the Todd Haynes film, ‘I’m Not There,’ there are five different Dylans played, and Dylan loved that movie, because it was, in fact, suggesting you have to have five actors play me because you can’t pin me down. This movie does pin down a particular moment, but what’s easy listening is that his relationships with the women are softened.  He’s not a nice guy to the women, he was the worst guy in real life.

JW: I have to say though, they do point that out–Joan Baez says to him, “You know, you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”

JP: But it doesn’t turn into the ferocious fight that you know it would’ve been. And then there are the moments, I believe it’s the one played by Elle Fanning, says, “You’re ambitious and it scares you.” And I was thinking, I guess. But you would’ve said the same thing to Napoleon. It doesn’t scare him so much that he doesn’t steamroll every single thing in his way to get there.
It softens the thing. We don’t see, for instance, when he’s cheating on the Elle Fanning character, when she’s off in Europe, because we know that other women are coming to the place, but we never see it. Partly we would like him less if we actually saw it, and the film wants you to keep liking him, which is hard–because he is not likable. Which, I think, is the strength of the movie, is by comparison with virtually any other biopic you can think of, he’s often doing things that betray people, disappoint people, sell them out–for himself.

JW: The title, ‘A Complete Unknown,’ comes from one of Bob’s greatest electric songs, one of the first ones, ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’  Some critics take it as to be a statement he’s making about himself, and it’s the title of this movie, they say, because the movie is about how a complete unknown becomes a world-famous superstar. But actually, that song is not autobiographical at all.  It is a nasty, bitter reproach to an unnamed woman:
“Once upon a time you dressed so fine,
threw the bums of dime,
in your prime,
didn’t you?”

JP: “Didn’t you?”

JW: But “now you don’t talk so loud,
now you don’t seem so proud,
about having to scrounge for your next meal.
How does it feel?
To be without a home,
like a complete unknown?”
That’s not about Bob Dylan himself.
But critics and Dylanologists have been trying to figure out, for 50 years, who is it about? Is it about Joan Baez? Well, she didn’t fall, she wasn’t unknown.  So what the heck is the song ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ what is it about?

JP:  Well, it is an attack song on an imaginary woman, and he wrote a great number of bitter songs about women, as well as the very beautiful ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit.’ I think that’s about Joan Baez. “My Love is like a raven at the window with a broken wing.” A beautiful line. He actually did write nice love songs, but he wrote a lot of bitter songs, and you can’t see where that comes from watching this movie.

JW:  Yeah. Getting back to the title, the line,’ A Complete Unknown,’ you say that doesn’t just refer to public knowledge, publicity, going from being unknown to being popular.  What does it mean?

JP: Nobody knows him.  Even the film doesn’t claim to know him. One of the good things about the film, once again, is that it’s not offering an explanation of him; instead it shows what he does.

JW: The biggest weakness of the film, I thought, was the conventional effort to have the rivalry between the two women, especially the portrayal of Bob’s relationship with the one who in real life was Suze Rotolo, his first real girlfriend in New York, the one who was with him on the cover of ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,’ she’s the one clutching his arm, shivering through the slushy streets of Greenwich Village in the winter. She looked fabulous on that cover, and she was an important part of his life for three years.  Those of us who care about those days know she was a real civil rights activist who introduced him to a lot of the civil rights movement. But I thought that part of the film was actually pretty lifeless. This was Elle Fanning’s part, pretty lifeless–especially compared to the heat between the Bob character and Joan Baez. One of the great moments comes when Joan leads him, also at Newport, in singing, “No, no, no, it ain’t me babe.”  She doesn’t want Bob, and Bob doesn’t want her — or folk music.

JP: Yes. Actually, I even think Joan Baez could have gotten more space. Part of the weakness of the film, it’s a Hollywood film so it has to be a certain length and all the rest, is that both the women and Pete Seeger exists more or less to register his genius too much of the time, and to then feel betrayed when he isn’t what they want.  But they don’t get quite enough separate reality by themselves. Especially the Suze Rotolo character.  She meets him, and you think what does she see in him and what does he see in her, and in real life they were together a long time, and you see none of that really.
And then, the Joan Baez thing was complicated because she’s a bigger star than he is. He does a little dig at her at the beginning of the film, one of the most in-character things in the entire film is basically him saying her songs are ‘probably too pretty.’ But Pete Seeger was a greater person than this film lets him be, because the film has to turn him into the person who’s trying to cut the electricity at Newport when Bob Dylan’s singing these songs that are going to define the world. But it’s the nature of biopics that everybody around them nearly always doesn’t get enough full life.

JW: Do you want to say anything more about how you portray genius in the movies? It’s a longstanding theme in film history, Kirk Douglas’s Van Gogh in ‘Lust for Life’, or the Mozart film that Miloš Forman made, ‘Amadeus’–how do they do it here, and what do you think about it?

JP: I think there are two ways to present genius, and in this film they do two. The easier way is to just show everybody be gobsmacked. So there are lots of reaction shots of people, from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger at the beginning, all the way through to even having Johnny Cash show up basically and tell him he’s a genius. So there’s that simple version.

Then the more interesting version, and it’s harder to do in films often, you can’t make the juxtaposition, which is to literally and accurately show the music that was being played when he turned up, and then show the music he wrote out of that tradition. And you can hear it and watch it and believe it, and I think that’s great in the film.

JW: One other thing—Bob Dylan himself wrote a memoir of those days, ‘Chronicles Volume One.’ It is wonderful, it’s one of the best things he ever did. And there’s also a really good audiobook of it, if you prefer audiobooks, this one is read by Sean Penn, who’s surprisingly terrific at being Bob Dylan.

JP: It’s a great book. I’m not sure I completely believe it, but it’s so incredibly well-written, so entertaining. If I can also add something, ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’ the Coen Brothers movie, about the folk singer in the same era–it gives you a backdrop to the world that Dylan entered, because Inside Llewyn Davi’ ends with Bob Dylan on stage, the first time Llewyn Davis is hearing him. Whatever you thought you were doing, that thing is over, because this guy is what you wanted to be.

JW: Final thoughts here: although I love the film, it was about my own youth. I wonder what it means for people who see it who are, er, young.

JP: Well, it will be interesting to know, because one always hears that all music is available now, and it’s alive now, yet often when I talk to young people, they don’t especially love Bob Dylan. They don’t see what the big deal was. Maybe the movie will help them see what the big deal was, which would be cool. What I always think of is, I’ve gone to see musicals sometimes, I think ‘Wicked’ would be one. I don’t know the music to ‘Wicked.’ I think I will have a hard time just following the words. For me, and for people of a certain generation, we could probably literally sing along with the songs. When my sister went to see the film in Berkeley, people were singing along with the song, okay? Because they all know all the lyrics. For young people, they may not know any of them, so you’re actually having to learn a new song in addition to everything else.
And often the first time you hear a song you don’t like it so much. It would be easier probably with the more electric stuff, somehow it has the kind of energy that gets into your head. They’re great songs, but if you’ve never heard them, would you think they’re great? I don’t know. It will be an interesting test because I can honestly say I know lots of people, let’s say over the age of 50 or so, who have seen it, I don’t know a single one who didn’t have a great time. Starting with ‘I had a great time,’ to much more than ‘I had a great time,’ and so it’ll be an interesting thing—because it may be it’s an older person’s hit. But that would be great. I’d like that, wouldn’t you? Of course, I’d like it to be a universal, across-the-board hit, where even young people discovered that this guy that we loved is in fact completely relevant now, and virtually all of his songs are.

JW: John Powers on ‘A Complete Unknown,’ the Bob Dylan movie starring Timothée Chalamet. Thank you, John.

JP: Sure, Jon. I could talk about this for hours.

JW: Donald Trump has been bad for America, but good for American book publishers. Dozens of books about Trump were published at the end of his first term, some selling millions of copies. Now that he’s coming back, it’s time to look at what the best of those books had to say about him. Herewith, my personal recommendations:

The best book that doesn’t mention Trump until the end—A Promised Land by Barack Obama.

During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis, Obama reports, Trump, who at that point was the host of “The Apprentice” on TV, called to suggest that he Trump be put in charge of plugging the well to stop the leak. When Obama told him that the well was almost sealed, Trump offered instead to build what he called “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House grounds. Obama declined. A few months later, Trump started tweeting that Obama had been born in Kenya. The next year, 2011, he speculated about running for president. Maybe Obama should have said yes to that ballroom offer.

Next category:  A book with a title that was disproved shortly after publication: Donald Trump Jr.’s book Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

When Don Jr.’s book tour came to UCLA, his speech was disrupted—but not by leftists, as promised in the subtitle. Instead, it was a right-wing group that took credit for the sustained yelling and booing that led Don Jr. to end his time on stage after only 35 minutes of what had been promoted as a two-hour event. According to the Guardian, the group that silenced Don Jr. were followers of a podcast, “America First,” who “believe the Trump administration has been taken captive by a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.”

Next, the least likely Trump book to be read—by anybody:
that would be My Fellow Americans … by Donald J. Trump: The Essential Speeches, Remarks, and Addresses of the Forty-fifth President of the United States of America, unabridged and annotated.
This is were you can find Trump’s the line “I alone can fix it” (from his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention). And if you want to read the full text of his “Remarks at the White House Conference on American History”—and who doesn’t?—you won’t find it anywhere on the web—you have to buy this book. This was the speech where he said that “a radical movement is attempting to demolish” the Constitution, “aided and abetted” by “large corporations.”

Next Category: Books by authors who were sued by Trump.

Number one on this list is the book The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton.

Trump sued his own former national security adviser a week before the book’s release date, long after it had already been shipped to bookstores and reviewers by the publisher. Trump’s Justice Department claimed the book contained classified national security information and asked a judge to seize Bolton’s $2-million advance and order him to get Simon & Schuster to retrieve and destroy all copies of the book that could be in the possession of third parties. The “national security” secrets included information already published in the New York Times, where Bolton confirmed the facts presented in the first impeachment proceedings about Trump and Ukraine. Notably missing from the lawsuit: a request for a temporary restraining order blocking Simon & Schuster from continuing to distribute the book. From that, you might conclude that Trump wasn’t really trying.

The second book whose author was sued by Trump: Melania and Me by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.

This was Melania’s longtime friend, who was sued by Trump’s Justice Department, which claimed the author violated a nondisclosure agreement Wolkoff signed when she came aboard as a volunteer assisting the first lady. The lawsuit sought to force her to surrender any profits from the book. The secrets the Justice Department sought to protect were that Melania was “selfish and image-obsessed” and didn’t get along with Ivanka Trump.

The third book whose author was sued by Trump: Unhinged by Omarosa Manigault Newman.

This is a memoir written by a contestant on “The Apprentice” who later became a campaign aide. Trump sued her for violating a nondisclosure agreement. The settlement Trump sought: she should pay close to $1 million for an ad campaign that would “correct” her statements describing Trump as a racist and a misogynist. She declined.

And our last book about Trump whose author was sued: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump.

In this case the president’s brother Robert sued to block publication of the book by their niece, claiming she had violated a confidentiality agreement signed almost 20 years earlier when Robert and Maryanne Trump, the sister of Donald, had negotiated a settlement of their father’s will. A lower court granted a temporary restraining order, but an appeals court ruled that her publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not bound by the confidentiality agreement and had a First Amendment right to publish.

Next category: The best title based on a Trump tweet:
that would be the book titled A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.

The authors quote Trump describing himself as “a very stable genius” not just once, but five times, and not just in tweets, but also in a press conference—at the NATO summit in July 2018, in response to a question about whether he would reverse his support for NATO.

And our final category: the best book read by Trump, ever:
Here we have no award.

Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer on Trump’s 1987 bestseller, Art of the Deal, told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker that Trump never read his own book, much less anybody else’s.

There’s one other book that transcends all the rest: What We Were Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,” by Carlos Lozada. 

He’s a political columnist for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer for criticism when he was reviewing books at The Washington Post. For this book, What We Were Thinking, Lozada read 150 other books about Trump and the Trump era—analyses of the white working class, manifestos of resistance, insider revelations, historical perspectives, memoirs, warnings over the future of the Republicans, the Democrats, and American democracy itself. Most of them he doesn’t like very much; he says most of them are merely symptomatic of the problems that gave rise to Trump in the first place. 

But he knows he has to pick the best ones, and he ends with a chapter on his top 12. His favorite of all 150 books on Trump and the Trump era is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, published at the beginning of Trump’s first term in 2017. I thought that book took too literally the idea that we needed to learn the history of the rise of Hitler to understand Trump—but Lozada likes it for a different reason: because what Timothy Snyder says about “the forms of resistance” to Hitler—which suggested “efforts that proved vital in countering Trump policies in his first term and in slowing Trump’s assault on democratic practices and institutions.”  “It is a work steeped in history,” Lozada writes, “yet imbued with the fierce urgency of ‘what now?’”

In particular, Timothy Snyder shows that “popular protests are an essential form of resistance.”

“Nothing is real that does not end in the streets,” Snyder writes. “But resistance also entails steady, methodical pushback”—from institutions, professions and bureaucrats. Court challenges delayed, altered, or overturned Trump initiatives. But “institutions do not protect themselves,” he reminds us. “So choose an institution you care about—” an organization, a newspaper, a labor union—and support it. That’s Timothy Snyder in his book On Tyranny, the one Carlos Lozada says he “turns to most often” of the 150 books on the Trump era that he read for his book What Were We Thinking.
Most of this list of the best Trump books was published originally in The LA Times.