Oscar nominees: Should biopics leave politics blowing in the wind?

In Conclave, a drama about the selection of a new pope, Cardinal Lawrence (played by Ralph Fiennes) delivers a brief speech around which the plot revolves. “There is one sin I’ve come to fear above all others: certainty,” Lawrence says. “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.”

The message is clearly directed at the Church’s conservative wing. Unsurprisingly, the movie has been popular among liberals and panned by conservatives. Ben Shapiro dismissed it as “propaganda about the evils of the Catholic Church,” and Megyn Kelly called it a “disgusting anti-Catholic film.” It’s neither. But nor is it really about the Church. It’s about politics, and the blindness that afflicts rigid ideologies of all types.

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The righteous intolerance of the left can be as oppressive and misguided as that of the right, as many who have been attacked by liberal mobs (online or otherwise)—or felt themselves censoring their own thoughts—can attest. Whether liberal viewers recognize that Lawrence’s speech takes aim at them too is an open question. The movie could have made that point more explicit, but it at least invites viewers into a conversation on the topic.

The same cannot be said of the Best Picture nominee whose protagonist challenged certainty on the left. A Complete Unknown is about a young Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York and his rise to stardom. The drama builds up to one of rock-n-roll’s most iconic moments: His decision to buck folk music purists by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he was famously booed. 

Director James Mangold takes great liberties with the story (it’s Hollywood, after all), and, as entertainment, the movie mostly succeeds, thanks to the strength of the acting and Timothée Chalamet’s studied impression of Dylan’s singing. But a central plot line—Dylan turning his back on politics — is left almost entirely unexamined. Why did he did stop writing the protest songs that had made him the face of the 1960s’ counter-culture?

That question has long frustrated liberals. A New York Times review of the film referred to Dylan’s “baffling neutrality.” Viewers are left to conclude that it was simply a matter of Dylan’s “orneriness” and desire to follow his own muse. But there’s more to the story. 

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A year before going electric, Dylan said he was done writing what he called “finger-pointing songs,” a shift he seemed to announce in his 1964 release My Back Pages. That song, which does not appear in the movie, is a blistering rejection of the left’s righteousness and a declaration of independence from its “lies that life is black and white.”

Dylan, like Cardinal Lawrence, took aim at certainty, but on the left. Perhaps that was omitted by the biopic because showing it would have required giving his character more depth, or since it might have put off some viewers. Regardless, in flattening Dylan, the movie deprives viewers of the chance to understand what led him to My Back Pages.

For anyone interested in that question, Jeffrey Edward Green’s new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, makes for fascinating reading. Green places Dylan in the prophetic tradition, but in a singular spot: uncertain about a world of moral chaos and determined to unflinchingly face its “ethical ambiguities”.

For Green, Dylan’s rejection of an article of faith on the left—that the demands of individual freedom and social justice can be harmonized—leads to his political break. Seeing the two in conflict, he stops pointing fingers, and in doubting his own power—if not the left’s—to bring about a new world order of peace and justice, Dylan refuses to sacrifice his life and art to the cause.

In this way, he embodies a trait that is rarely attributed to him: humility. Rather than delivering answers as the “spokesman for a generation,” Dylan devotes himself to exploring questions—what Green calls “incessant searching”—not about the world as it might be, but about the human condition as it is. For Dylan, that search—and the uncertainty that underpins it—has never ended.

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In Conclave, Cardinal Lawrence prays for “a pope who doubts.” As 88-year-old Pope Francis faces a health scare, it’s anyone’s guess whether his eventual successor will fit that bill. But for more than 50 years now, we have had a prophet who doubts. If only A Complete Unknown had allowed people to see him. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs.