"From the very first scenes, as played by Chalamet, this Dylan has no use for anything other than his own songs and his desperate, entirely internalized, need to keep making them."

"Everyone else... they’re all just obstacles that stand in his way. Chalamet’s Dylan is aloof, peevish and, frankly, kind of a jerk. Nearly everyone in his orbit suffers accordingly. The closer they try to get, the more Dylan vaporizes and wafts away. But this doesn’t happen because of fame or riches or drugs, like it would in most music biopics. It happens because of who Dylan is. He just doesn’t care. He lives his life and writes his music and manages his career like a man who knows everyone around him is trying to write a biopic about him."

Writes Will Leitch, in "Don’t think twice, Dylan fans. ‘A Complete Unknown’ is all right. The impossibility of ever truly understanding Bob Dylan is the movie’s central tension" (WaPo).

I wonder if Will Leitch is related to Donovan (Leitch). Just an idle thought. It's hard to see how it would matter. Anyway, are you planning to watch this movie? Bob Dylan recommended the movie. I blogged about that 13 days ago, here. He also recommended the book the movie is based on — "Dylan Goes Electric" (commission earned) — saying, "After you’ve seen the movie read the book." But the movie doesn't premiere until Christmas, so I went and read the book out of order. I do some of the things Bob tells me to do. Some of them. Not all of them. 

Here's something from the book that I happened to highlight:

In those first months a lot of people regarded Dylan as just another young folksinger with a particularly abrasive voice, and some are still baffled by his success. But others say he stood out immediately: “He just had it,” Kweskin recalls: 

He was electric. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. He was magnetic. At the time, to me, it was more his presence than it was his music. I liked his music, but what was special was his personality. He was just one of those people that he got up onstage and he owned it. 

Van Ronk noted that Dylan’s performances in this period were very different from anything he did in later years: 

Back then, he always seemed to be winging it, free-associating, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever seen onstage. . . . He had a stage persona that I can only compare to Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Fellow.” He was a very kinetic performer, he never stood still, and he had all these nervous mannerisms and gestures. He was obviously quaking in his boots a lot of the time, but he made that part of the show. There would be a one-liner, a mutter, a mumble, another one-liner, a slam at the guitar. Above all, his sense of timing was uncanny: he would get all of these pseudo-clumsy bits of business going, fiddling with his harmonica rack and things like that, and he could put an audience in stitches without saying a word. 

The Village scene provided Dylan with a unique opportunity to learn and polish his skills.... Dylan was playing the standard neo-ethnic mix of old ballads and blues, but unlike most people on the folk scene he did not present them as museum pieces. He made the music come alive in new ways....

That is, he was something special as a performer aside from and before all those famous words.