"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:

"... Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke..."

"... Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing 'Hello darkness, my old friend,' for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance — though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn’t been laughing at them, specifically, he’d just had a fit of the giggles — and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan."

That's from the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "Episode 135: 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel." 

I've never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, though, of course, I've often enjoyed listening to their songs. They did seem self-absorbedly gloomy, and I completely identify with the people who thought it was funny to intone — out of the blue — "Hello darkness, my old friend." I have a vivid memory from 1965, when "I Am a Rock" was a hit, and I was 14. I was with some of my girlfriends and a boy from our class, walking by, suddenly and, I think sincerely, sang out "I Am a Rock." Oh, how we laughed at him! It still makes me laugh. You're a rock, are you? That's so interesting. I guess if he was a rock, our derision didn't hurt him.

Knowing little of S&G's background, I learned a lot from that episode: