How singer-songwriter 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.”

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”.