A Deep Dive Into Johnny Cash Offering Bob Dylan a Bugle in ‘A Complete Unknown’
There are factual liberties taken in the new Dylan biopic, but none as mystifying as a scene involving the corn snack Bugles.
Occasionally in blockbuster musician biopics, you will see an absurd or inadvertently funny moment that breaks the facade of self-serious homage common in these films—like the “he’s white?!” part from Elvis. There’s a scene near the climax of the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, that I can’t stop thinking about, and it has nothing to do with Timothée Chalamet or really even Dylan. It’s the summer of 1965 outside a motel in Newport, Rhode Island, and Bobby D is feeling the heat over rumors that he’ll be “going electric” for his closing set at Newport Folk Festival. Pete Seeger’s all like, You got the whole (folk) world in your hands, don’t mess this up for us, kid, but Dylan’s been recording Highway 61 Revisited with rock musicians and can’t resist the thrill of amplification. Still, he’s feeling a little torn.
Enter: a drunk Johnny Cash, Dylan’s onetime pen pal. I read the scene as quiet encouragement from Johnny to Bob, a tacit nudge to stay true to himself, but really, it’s kind of randomly thrown in. Cash is about to leave town when Dylan asks him for a cigarette; he gives Bob the whole pack, places a bottle of Coca-Cola on the hood of his car, tries to back out of a parking space with his driver’s side door still open, rear-ends the car next to him, then hits another car, hops up, and offers Dylan a Bugle. As in, the super-salty corn chips shaped like a dunce cap, that adults and children alike wear on their fingers before munching them down. To be clear, Cash did not eat the Bugles off his fingers. Dylan—chain-smoking and on the brink of a culture-shifting performance—seems uninterested in trying a Bugle. (The following clip is everything but the Bugles bit.)
