Everything, as Charles Peguy said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Except if you're Bob Dylan. If you're Bob Dylan, you start political and go mystical. You start as an apprentice hobo scuffing out songs of change; you become, under protest, the ordained and prophetic mouthpiece for a sense of mass disturbance otherwise known as the '60s; and then, after some violent gestures and severances, you withdraw. You dematerialize; you drop it all, and you drift into the recesses of the Self. Where you remain, until they give you a Nobel Prize. James Mangold's A Complete Unknown, like all the best movies about rock stars'Sid and Nancy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Control'is a fairy tale. It takes liberties: Dylanologists will scream. It dramatizes, mythicizes, elides, elasticizes, and tosses twinkling magic showbiz confetti over the period between Dylan's absolutely unheralded arrival in New York in 1961 and his honking, abrasive, ain't-gonna-work-on-Maggie's-farm-no-more headlining...
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