Early on in the new biopic on Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, Elle Fanning, playing Dylan’s girlfriend Silvie Russo, is snooping around his writing desk in his New York apartment.
As she flips through his childhood scrapbook, labeled with his given name, Robert Zimmerman, she sees a photo of a young Dylan with a group of friends.
“That’s me!” whispered Louie Kemp as he pokes me in the shoulder.
And he meant it. The photo was real, featuring boyhood friends Kemp and Dylan at the Jewish-themed Herzl Camp in Madison, Wisconsin, which they attended together every summer from 1953 to ’59. According to Kemp, his buddy Zimmerman once raided a fellow camper’s cabin with shaving cream. He also performed in public with his guitar for the first time from a camp cabin rooftop.
The 82-year-old Kemp, who made aliyah from California to Jerusalem last year, was as charged as a kid in a toy store, as we settled in the cushioned seats at Jerusalem’s Cinema City on Sunday night – with a jumbo-sized popcorn.
A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold and featuring Timothee Chalamet in an Oscar-nominated performance as the young Dylan, has received rave reviews since it was released last month (it premiered in Israel last week).
With a beautiful halo of hair, a guitar on his back and a generation-changing slew of songs in his head, Dylan, who by then had changed his name from Zimmerman, hitchhikes to New York City from his Minnesota home in 1961, when the film begins.
“He told me he was going to go to New York and see Woody Guthrie, and I said, ‘okay,’” recalled Kemp, saying that their paths diverged for a decade.
Kemp went to the University of Minnesota, and then took over his family’s fish business and soon turned it mega-successful, expanding to Alaska and becoming a smoked fish empire.
But during the axis-changing five years covered in the film, when Dylan emerged as the bard of the ’60s with anthems like “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Kemp kept in touch with his childhood friend through Dylan’s mother, Beatty.
“Whenever I ran into Beatty, she would pass on messages for me from Bob – or as she would call him, ‘my Bobby,’” said Kemp.
In 1972, however, Dylan reconnected directly with Kemp, and the two become inseparable for the next two decades. As manager of the legendary Rolling Thunder Review tour in the mid-1970s, Kemp rubbed shoulders with many of the characters in A Complete Unknown, including folksinger Bobby Neuwirth, who acted as Dylan’s aide de camp, and Dylan’s sometimes muse, Joan Baez, who Kemp was romantically involved with for a time.
In one scene of the film when Monica Barabaro as a stunning Baez reprimands Dylan in a curt style, Kemp whispered, “She got it exactly, Joanie sounded just like that.”
Kemp also said that Chalamet completely captured the mannerisms, speech patterns, and appearance of Dylan, who he’s fallen out of touch with in recent decades.
“I was watching the Bob up there that I used to know,” he said.
Kemp, along with my pal and fellow Dylan aficionado, Calev, pointed out to each other in nerdy fashion some of the historical inaccuracies or Hollywood-embellished moments in the film, but were totally mesmerized.
We watched riveted as the film climaxed with Dylan’s 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, when he shocked the crowd and the organizers (including his champion Pete Seeger, played exceptionally by Ed Norton) by plugging in with a crack band featuring fellow Jews Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper and performing a blaring electric set.
Singing along involuntarily
AS THE final credits scrolled on the screen over the Chalamet version of Dylan’s landmark “Like A Rolling Stone,” Kemp began to almost involuntarily sing along with his old friend.
“How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone”
We joined in, and 60 years after it was recorded, the question Dylan threw out like a slap-in-the-face challenge to an entire generation still felt entirely relevant.
If nothing else, the film reminds the world that Dylan’s songwriting at such a tender age was astounding, and the songs stand the test of time.
“I did once ask Bob how he was able to write songs like he does, and he told me they just come to him. ‘God puts them in my head and I write them down. The credit doesn’t go to me,’” said Kemp when I first met him in 2021. “That clarity and the humble way he has transmitted his gift is the core of his legacy.”
Needless to say, as we left the nearly empty theater, we deposited the barely half-eaten bucket of popcorn by the trash. The film had left us with more than enough to chew on.