I’ll admit it straight off: I don’t know write about Bob Dylan. It’s like being requested to put in writing in regards to the scent of your childhood residence. Each terrible, stunning reminiscence; each worry, need, and promise; each premonition and uncertainty—it’s all there: the origin, the prototype, the coordinates of your future feeling. It’s arduous to explain one thing like that.

What I imply is, I actually love Bob Dylan. I all the time have. He’s my favourite musician in an enormous, dumb, jealous, infantile manner: a love that’s unknowing and primitive. And so I’m all the time a bit suspicious of the impulse, in myself and others, to determine what precisely is happening there, to interrupt him down, to make him manageable and coherent. Studying books and watching films and listening to podcasts about Dylan—which I do, on a regular basis—can really feel a bit like going to the shop, discovering a type of scents from childhood emanating from a bottle of laundry detergent or hand cleaning soap, and studying out the elements on the again: sodium lauryl sulfate. Propylene glycol. Fluorescent brightener 71. What’s this obtained to do with something? Weren’t we speaking about my mom?

James Mangold’s new Dylan biopic, A Full Unknown, provokes an analogous response. The movie, which stars Hollywood marvel waif Timothée Chalamet, is suffused with unspecific nostalgia. It reminds you of all the things, and but its elements are nonetheless a little bit of puzzle.

This makes for a movie you would possibly need to see as Dylan devotee, however one which can also be unsatisfying in lots of different methods. “Artwork is a disagreement,” Dylan writes in his most up-to-date e book, The Philosophy of Trendy Track. “Cash is an settlement.” A Full Unknown, it should be mentioned, is a extremely agreeable film. The units and costumes are period-appropriate; the lighting is cozy; the performances are believable. Ed Norton is particularly good as Pete Seeger, a kindly oedipal uncle and the people guru whom Bob should disappoint (if not fairly destroy) to finish his changing into. The music, which Chalamet performs competently, appears like an imperfect compromise between verisimilitude—it’s actually Timmy singing up there!—and the need of displaying Dylan’s artistry. It lands in an ersatz, uncanny place, however it’s not disagreeable.

The story of A Full Unknown is a well-recognized one. In short: Child-faced Bob arrives in Greenwich Village, guitar in hand, lies to each fairly lady he meets, and takes over the people scene with the pressure of his character, his soulful harp work, and his potential to put in writing new songs that sound as tender, pressing, and otherworldly as the normal ones everybody else was enjoying. Quickly our Midwestern parvenu falls for an activist painter (Elle Fanning) and for the good Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). He will get signed by Columbia, turns into a star, after which betrays his girlfriends, followers, and mentors by “going electrical”—that’s, by embracing rock over people, transgression over leftist piety, and his personal ungovernable creative impulses over custom, loyalty, or fidelity. (Recall: Artwork is a disagreement.)

However a part of the issue is that, not like Dylan, Mangold’s movie (cowritten by Jay Cocks and based mostly on Elijah Wald’s 2015 e book Dylan Goes Electrical!) is trustworthy, reverent, and cautious with its materials. The story unfolds mechanically, like a Disney experience on rails. All of your favourite characters are right here, in real looking facsimile: There’s Dave Van Ronk! Right here comes Johnny Money! That’s Alan Lomax! That’s Bob Neuwirth! (Greenwich Village is a small world in spite of everything….) Not everybody goes to catch or care in regards to the second when Al Kooper (performed right here by Charlie Tahan), then a 21-year-old guitar participant, talks his manner into the recording session for Like a Rolling Stone and begins plunking chords on an organ. However actual heads know.

Maybe the film is much less like a Disney experience and extra like that different profitable Disney amusement: the superhero film. One needn’t catch each reference to observe the movie; however for followers of the Dylan Prolonged Universe, there are Easter eggs galore! When Bob buys an Acme whistle on the road a number of scenes earlier than recording “Freeway 61 Revisited,” Dylan nerds are alleged to relish the second—there it’s! The whistle! Similar to on the report!—as if we’re watching Thor brandish his hammer or Captain America his defend. (That is maybe no coincidence, on condition that Mangold has directed a number of X-Males movies.)

Opinions might differ, however I don’t get pleasure from being infantilized on this manner. “Fan service” is a sickening, adolescent ordeal. If a movie aspires to be artwork, it can’t probably succeed by way of flattery—i.e., by displaying us stuff we already know. “That’s the issue with lots of issues as of late,” Dylan grouses in The Philosophy of Trendy Track. “The whole lot is just too full now; we’re spoon-fed all the things. All songs are about one factor and one factor particularly, there isn’t any shading, no nuance, no thriller. Maybe this is the reason music shouldn’t be a spot the place folks put their desires in the intervening time; desires suffocate in these airless environs.” The previous man is true. And the identical could be mentioned for films.

A Full Unknown does handle some nuance and shading in its depiction of Dylan’s romantic life. Chalamet is most plausible as an infuriating lover boy—needy, flighty, and affected. (See additionally his flip because the self-serious dirtbag boyfriend in Girl Chicken.) Chalamet has chemistry with each of the movie’s feminine leads. Barbaro is alluring and sarcastic as Baez; Fanning, honest and wounded as Sylvie Russo (a stand-in for Dylan’s first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo).

In issues of affection, Dylan has all the time struck me as a well-recognized masculine kind: He likes being taken, however resents being had. (“I’m homeless, come and take me….”) One thing of the identical dynamic has performed out between Dylan and his viewers. In Chronicles, Dylan describes being infuriated when Ronnie Gilbert launched him on the Newport People Pageant by saying, “And right here he’s…take him, you understand him, he’s yours.” (Bob: “What a loopy factor to say! Screw that.”) Being tied down, cornered, caught: These are Dylan’s primordial fears. (“I didn’t belong to anyone then or now.”) After all, there’s irony on this: Fame is a recipe for being hounded and used. Thus Dylan’s affinity for evasive maneuvers. Once we get too shut, once we assume now we have him, can declare him, he reacts: He throws us off his path. He goes electrical. (“Strike one other match, go begin anew….”)

One other manner of claiming “Artwork is a disagreement” is to say that artwork is about making selections. No matter else is true, Dylan is an artist who has continually made selections, usually unpleasant ones. The concept of “going electrical” captivates us as a result of it succinctly exemplifies this impulse: to danger antagonizing one’s viewers (or to take action intentionally) in pursuit of 1’s creative imaginative and prescient. Sure, it’s a cliché, however it’s not a cliché that applies to all that many pop stars as we speak. And the factor is, Dylan didn’t cease going electrical. Within the 5 years after Mangold’s movie ends (1965), he went electrical once more by going acoustic on John Wesley Harding, by going nation on Nashville Skyline, by going schizoid on Self Portrait. On the finish of the ’70s, he went electrical by changing into a born-again Christian and recording three albums of gospel songs.

Mangold appears to grasp this about Dylan, however A Full Unknown doesn’t take any comparable dangers. After enduring the “airless environs” of Mangold’s dutiful movie, it was refreshing to rewatch Todd Haynes’s 2007 I’m Not There, through which six actors depict completely different facets of Dylan’s persona. The movie is filled with completely bewildering selections, and it succeeds because of this. You received’t miss Chalamet whereas watching Cate Blanchett as drug-addled, mid-Nineteen Sixties “mod” Bob. It doesn’t harm both that Haynes’s soundtrack is filled with Dylan covers by precise musicians, plus a number of tracks sung by—get this—Bob Dylan.

If A Full Unknown largely reiterates the Dylan fable, nonetheless, that’s more likely to please the person himself. Dylan has all the time had an awesome reverence for myths and little or no respect for myth-puncturers (i.e., the press). “Folks make up their previous, Sylvie!” Chalamet roars in a single scene. “They bear in mind what they need. They neglect the remaining.”

There’s an fascinating passage in The Philosophy of Trendy Track when Dylan writes about Johnny Money’s “Massive River,” which he prefers to “the august solemnity of the homicide ballads, hardscrabble tales and Trent Reznor covers that his followers got here to count on.” Dylan doesn’t like his Johnny Money enfeebled, harm, or weak—as Money seems on his closing, Rick Rubin–produced information. “He might climb throughout rivers,” Dylan writes. “He might lay monitor and take down greenhorns. He’s a teller of tall tales—elements the clouds and drinks nitro. That is the actual Johnny Money, and ‘Massive River’ is his theme tune.” For Dylan, Johnny Money was each bit as large as he claimed to be; the parable was the person.

Boyd Holbrook’s efficiency as Money in A Full Unknown is pleasant exactly as a result of he’s all cartoonish swagger and sexual charisma; he’s bigger than life. Dylan, for his half, has been too many issues for any one in every of his myths to be true—which is why Haynes cut up him into six. The one fixed for Dylan is movement. In Chronicles, he recollects his grandmother telling him, “Happiness isn’t on the street to something. Happiness is the street.” Satirically, she in all probability meant one thing like “Respect what you have got.” Dylan took it to imply: Go. As he writes in The Philosophy of Trendy Track, “The factor about being on the street is that you simply’re not slowed down by something. Not even unhealthy information. You give pleasure to different folks and you retain your grief to your self.” As depicted in A Full Unknown, younger Bob resented his viewers (and his lovers) for attempting to personal him. However I ponder if that’s nonetheless true for mature Bob—or if he hasn’t discovered a sure consolation in fidelity. Touring on a regular basis—which he does, to this present day—is an odd strategy to evade your public.

Probably the most stunning songs on Dylan’s 2020 report Tough and Rowdy Methods, known as “I’ve Made Up My Thoughts to Give Myself to You.” On the album, it reads as a touching love tune, one in every of his finest. However when he sings it stay, one other which means is not possible to overlook. Eventually: He’s ours. The reality is, we don’t want James Mangold to offer us Bob Dylan; he has carried out so himself.