In A Complete Unknown, the Triumph Bonneville Embodies Dylan’s Mystique

As the Eastern seaboard is on the verge of annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bob Dylan, in his cramped apartment, watches President John F. Kennedy explain this dire nuclear threat on television. But he’s not among the countless New Yorkers who subsequently try to flee the city; instead, he stays behind to bear witness, channels the fear and uncertainty into his music, and heads over to the nearby Gaslight Cafe to play a new song: “Masters of War.” 

This scene in director James Mangold’s new Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, didn’t really happen, at least not the way it’s depicted, but it feels emotionally true. The film plays more like an impressionistic rendering of the era than a traditional biopic. Dylan remains elusive throughout the film, refusing to be defined. His 1964 Triumph Bonneville T100 feels like an expression of his rebellion against expectations. 

Dylan famously rode this motorcycle and infamously crashed it a year after the events of the film. Dylan kept characteristically close-mouthed about the crash, telling Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner in 1969 that, “it limited me. It’s hard to speak about the change, you know? It’s not the type of change that one can put into words … besides the physical change. I had a busted vertebrae; neck vertebrae. And there’s really not much to talk about. I don’t want to talk about it.” Though he went into seclusion after the crash, it ultimately did not stop him from riding.

As played by the film’s star Timothée Chalamet, Bob Dylan is as charismatic and magnetic as he is awkward and remote, and his music feels more revelatory than anything he says to his friends, the musicians who find themselves in his orbit. Though the film only covers 1961 through 1965, it’s a fraught few years where Dylan observes everything from the assassinations of President Kennedy and Malcolm X to the end of segregation. He feels like a barometer of the zeitgeist, inadvertently becoming the Voice of a Generation as he transmutes these events into songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” 

A Complete Unknown depicts a cultural moment that both springs from its characters and coalesces around them. The film is really as much about Dylan as it is about this makeshift family and his effect on them, like Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo (a fictional stand-in for Suze Rotolo), Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger, and Scoot McNairy’s Woody Guthrie. Since Mangold’s and Jay Cocks’ screenplay is loosely based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that this movie shows Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Music Festival. To folk purists like Seeger and musicologist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), this performance was a betrayal. And emotionally, it seems like Dylan’s further isolating himself from his friends. But historically, this act of defiance feels like a musician breaking free of the past to usher in the modern age.

The iconic Triumph Bonneville was born in 1958 and named after the Bonneville Salt Flats; Johnny Allen had set several motorcycle speed records there riding a streamliner nicknamed “the Texas Ceegar,” which was powered by Triumph engines. Allen’s accomplishments awakened a desire in the public for a higher-performance version of the T110 650cc. Simply put, Americans wanted more power, and Triumph’s touring bike just wasn’t cutting it. Though technically a British creation, the Bonneville was designed for the American market; boasting twin carburetors and a higher-spec engine, this new sporting bike exceeded their hopes. 

It was an instant hit that became one of the greatest bikes of all time. When motorcycle magazine Cycle road-tested the Bonneville in 1969, editors wrote, “This prince among two-wheelers is one of the two or three most desirable motorcycles being made in the world today.” Marlon Brando, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen all owned one. (Notably, Brando rode a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird in The Wild One, the film that birthed and inspired countless riders.) It became the hottest bike to own in the ‘60s, and the most popular imported bike in the States. This British machine came to embody American cool. It’s no wonder that this particular bike became the instrument of Dylan’s freedom, a legend for a legend.

Barbaro’s Baez is a force of her own, Dylan’s romantic interest as much as his musical rival, a true love-hate relationship. We catch a brief glimpse of her 1961 silver Jaguar XKE convertible parked outside her California home as Dylan arrives on his Bonneville. Though Dylan clocks her as a try-hard (he says her songs are like the oil paintings at the dentist’s office), Baez is already famous at this point: she’s been on the cover of Time, and her gorgeous car encapsulates her cool and her success. In And a Voice to Sing with: A Memoir, Baez writes off the Jaguar as the byproduct of an identity crisis that came with her newfound status. She recalls the way she saw The Beatles react to a vending machine in their dressing room that was modified so no money was required; despite being filthy rich at the time, they were delighted by the free drinks: “In their minds they were still working-class Liverpudlians.”

Baez claims she had a “mini-version of that same identity confusion”; when she moved to Big Sur, she rented a tiny cabin (which she describes as a “pigsty”), bought condensed milk to save money, owned one pair of sheets, and had no phone. But one day, on a whim, she spent six thousand dollars on the silver Jag.

For a car bought without any forethought, though, Baez couldn’t have made a better choice. The Jaguar E-Type defined the ‘60s as much as Dylan and Baez did. It’s one of the most famous sports cars ever made, and for good reason—a work of art. A sexy, sleek, sculptural masterpiece of aesthetics and aerodynamics. (It was, in fact, designed by Jaguar’s automotive aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer, who’d previously worked for the Bristol Aeroplane Company as an aircraft engineer during World War II.) The Commendatore himself, Enzo Ferrari, famously dubbed it “the most beautiful car ever made,” and the Museum of Modern Art acquired a 1963 E-Type roadster in 1996 to showcase its design and exemplify the era. The press release that announced the new addition to the museum’s collection declared it “the paradigm of the modern sports car.” Like the Bonneville, it’s another feat of British engineering and art. No one has ever compared the E-Type to an oil painting in a dentist’s office.

A Complete Unknown’s authentic period details extend to its cars, of course, and glossy dreams of the era can be seen gliding by in the background or parked on the street. These include, but are not limited to, a Ford Fairlane 500, a Plymouth Fury, a Ford Country sedan station wagon, a Cadillac Coupe DeVille, a Ford Falcon Futura, and a Chrysler New Yorker.

This vehicular history is often intertwined with music history—not just with Dylan’s Triumph and Baez’s Jag, but with another cameo made by Johnny Cash’s ride: a pale silver Cadillac convertible. Although Cash would later on become a Cadillac owner in his own right, it’s more likely this example belongs to his then-girlfriend June Carter. (She’s depicted in Mangold’s Walk the Line driving a ’63 Cadillac Series 62 convertible.) In one scene, Cash attempts to move his diagonally parked Cadillac outside the Viking Motel when he realizes it’s blocking Dylan’s Bonneville. Cash is visibly hammered and probably hopped up on pills, as this was around the time his substance abuse issues were most dire. Holbrook’s Cash explains, “a guy I knew in the Air Force had a Triumph. Gotta prime it up,” as he hits the cars parked on either side of him. Meanwhile, Dylan smokes, untroubled by the chaos.

Like Dylan, Cash would also crash this vehicle just a few months later, wrapping it around a telephone pole in Nashville and knocking out his teeth. (Doctors allegedly refused to treat him, believing him to be “bad news.”) In Cash’s hands the Cadillac here feels oversize and unwieldy, a testament to his conditions at the time. It’s also fighting, as the Man in Black was an avowed fan of big cars and land yachts. During his life, his collection included a 1947 Lincoln Continental, a 1970 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, a 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood, a 1990 Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL W126 Saloon, a 1910 Buick, and a 2001 Lincoln Town Car Cartier L. Most of these cars were painted black.

Johnny’s and June’s love of Cadillacs is well documented. In Anchored in Love, John Carter Cash describes his mother in the Carter family’s big Cadillac, “…while she was known for her calm, laid-back demeanor everywhere else, when it came to driving, she apparently was like a woman possessed. According to everything I’ve heard, she flew over those roads, pedal to the floor.” 

In 1976, Cash recorded the song “One Piece at a Time” about a Detroit assembly line worker who longs to own his own Cadillac while he builds them for others. Over the course of 25 years, he steals parts to Frankenstein together a car of his own. Cash’s producers commissioned the owner of Abernathy Auto Parts and Hilltop Auto Salvage, Bruce Fitzpatrick, to construct a real-life “Psychobilly Cadillac” for publicity photos. Tragically, Fitzpatrick scrapped it when The House of Cash museum went bankrupt in the ‘80s.

A man named Bill Patch, however, took it upon himself to make his own motley Caddy as a gift to Cash, kicking off a friendship that lasted a lifetime. The patchwork Caddy remains the ultimate homage to the luxury vehicle (or maybe the ultimate travesty, depending on who you ask). The cobbled-together car remains on display at Hideaway Farms Museum in Tennessee.

There’s a scene in A Complete Unknown where Fanning’s Sylvie discusses the 1942 film Now, Voyager with Bob. She says that Bette Davis’s character found herself in the film, but Dylan counters, “She didn’t find herself like her ‘self’ was a missing shoe or something. She just made herself into something different. [ . . . ] You know, what she wanted to be. In that moment.”

This perspective echoes something Dylan says in 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue: “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding things. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.” Bob Dylan’s identity is an ever-evolving artistic creation on par with his songs; his Bonneville proved to be an essential element of his mystique, his self-invention, his freedom. It remains an indelible signifier of cool.