How Bob Dylan stole Christmas

At the start of December, out of the blue, author Elijah Wald received an early Christmas present from Bob Dylan. In a message posted to social media, the legendarily elusive singer-songwriter praised the casting of Timothée Chalamet as his younger self in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown and then took a moment to salute Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, which helped inspire the new film. “It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early Sixties that led up to the fiasco at Newport,” wrote Dylan. “After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”

When I catch up with him at his home in Philadelphia, Wald sounds as if he’s barely recovered from the shock. “It was astonishing,” he says. “Completely unexpected. Historically, he simply hasn’t done that. I had asked his manager at some point whether he had seen the book, and the response was: Bob doesn’t read Dylan books. So this was a very pleasant surprise.”

A Complete Unknown dramatises the early years of Dylan’s much-mythologised career, from his hitchhiked journey to New York out of wintry Minnesotan obscurity in 1961, to his rise in the Greenwich Village folk scene and eventual embrace of high-powered electric rock’n’roll just a few short years later. The Independent critic Clarisse Loughrey felt the film plays it too safe, calling it “dutiful work” but arguing “dutiful doesn’t really cut it with Dylan”. American reviewers have tended to be kinder, with Variety calling the biopic “incandescent” and praising scenes that make “your heart burst and your head spin at the same time”.

For his part, Wald says he was pleased with how Walk the Line director James Mangold handled the adaptation. While A Complete Unknown is “not historically accurate,” he tells me, “it is poetically accurate”. Wald’s book examines the connection between folk’s elder statesman Pete Seeger and the young Dylan, intent on leaving the folk scene in his rearview mirror. “In the film they take that idea and personalise it,” explains Wald. “Dylan and Seeger, in fact, were not in the same room very often but in the film they make it a personal relationship and it’s pretty extraordinarily true to who they were. It didn’t happen that way, but it could have.”

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While there are no sleigh bells to be heard on the soundtrack, and no scenes of Chalamet and co-star Elle Fanning nuzzling under the mistletoe, there’s something fitting about the fact that the film will be released in the US on Christmas Day (although, sadly, it will take another three weeks to reach the UK). Nick Pupo, the comedian and actor who plays Peter Yarrow of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary in the film, says the movie’s cross-generational appeal fits snugly with the festive spirit.

“It’s so broad,” he says. “I love Dylan so much, and I grew up as a millennial at a time when most people had already forgotten about him or didn’t care. What’s great about this movie is it celebrates the time, the people and the music. I told my nieces I was going to be in a movie about Bob Dylan and they were like: ‘OK?’ Then I was like: ‘Timothée Chalamet’s in it’ and they were like: ‘OH MY GOD!’ I think it’ll be really cool for them to watch it. Walk the Line introduced a lot of people to Johnny Cash’s music, and I’m sure this will [do the same for Dylan].”

Beyond the film’s wide appeal, it also makes a lot of sense for A Complete Unknown to arrive into the world on the same date as Jesus Christ – and, coincidentally, Shane MacGowan, who was born on Christmas Day in 1957, and of whom Dylan was a big fan. Dylan has long since proven himself a Christmas enthusiast. Back in 2006, he devoted two solid hours to the subject on his Theme Time Radio Hour show, playing an assortment of his favourite festive tunes, reading from Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and reciting “’Twas the night before Christmas”. He also took the time to reflect on the 17th-century British parliament’s attempt to abolish Christmas in 1647, reassuring listeners that: “Here on Theme Time Radio Hour we like to celebrate Christmas year-round, no matter what Oliver Cromwell thinks.”

Dylan cemented his status as a Christmas staple three years later with the release of Christmas in the Heart, an album that drew baffled scepticism from critics when it was first announced. Dylan’s singular oeuvre has been described in many ways over the decades, but rarely as “jolly”. Yet, somehow, an album that blends traditional standards like “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” with covers of some of the more obscure tracks he’d picked out for his radio show, such as Hal Moore and Bill Fredericks’s jaunty “Must Be Santa”, made for an endearing listen that’s become an annual tradition for many fans.

The music video for the latter song represents perhaps the giddiest and most downright silly three minutes you’ll find anywhere in Dylan’s long and storied career, as he dances and carouses his way through a drunken polka at a late-night house party while wearing a long flowing wig and a white top hat that he later switches for a Santa hat. Rolling Stone described it simply as “bonkers”.

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While some had initially treated the album as a joke and assumed Dylan would too, in fact, he plays the songs without a hint of irony. Sure, nobody would ever accuse Dylan of being a traditional Christmas crooner in the mould of Bing Crosby or even Michael Bublé, but there’s something irresistibly charming about his gravel-throated renditions of “Silver Bells” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. You can almost hear the tinsel-like twinkle in his eye as he takes the reins of singing cowboy Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” or casts off for “Christmas Island”.

In a 2009 interview with journalist Bill Flanagan, published in The Big Issue, Dylan said: “Critics [who assumed I was being ironic] are on the outside looking in. They are definitely not fans or the audience that I play to. They would have no gut-level understanding of me and my work, what I can and can’t do – the scope of it all. Even at this point in time they still don’t know what to make of me.” As to why he played the songs straight, he added: “There wasn’t any other way to play it. These songs are part of my life, just like folk songs. You have to play them straight too.”

Although Dylan – born Robert Zimmerman – grew up in a Jewish household, he said that he never felt left out of Christmas during his childhood in Minnesota. He shared fond memories of “plenty of snow, jingle bells, Christmas carollers going from house to house, sleighs in the streets, town bells ringing, nativity plays” and described an ideal Christmas dinner of “mashed potatoes and gravy, roast turkey and collard greens, turnip greens, biscuit dressing, cornbread and cranberry sauce”.

Dylan famously became a born-again evangelical Christian for a handful of years from 1979 to 1981, releasing a trio of gospel-inspired albums in that time, and while he still describes himself as a “true believer”, his devotion to Christmas appears to be rooted more in nostalgia than religious fervour. Christmas has the best songs of any holiday, he reflected, “maybe because it’s so worldwide and everybody can relate to it in their own way”.

Dylan also put the attention garnered by his unlikely Christmas release to good use, dedicating all proceeds from the album to homeless charities including Feeding America in the US, Crisis in the UK and the United Nations World Food Programme. “They get food straight to the people,” he explained at the time. “No military organisation, no bureaucracy, no governments to deal with.” Those royalty donations have continued in perpetuity, so money brought in by the album continues to be dispersed to those in need each Christmas.

Inside Dylan’s caustic, inscrutable persona there lies the heart of someone who just wants to spread a little Christmas cheer. His biopic, then, couldn’t be better timed. After all, A Complete Unknown tells the story of a miraculous boy child who arrives with a head full of wild, prophetic ideas, upsets the establishment and ends up changing the world. What could be more Christmassy than that?

‘A Complete Unknown’ is in US cinemas on Christmas Day, before arriving in the UK on 17 January