Are you gonna go see that Dylan movie?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve heard mixed reviews.”

“Me, too. But you know, the other music biopics have been good. Buddy Holly.  Johnny Cash.”

“Yes, they were.  I liked them both.”

“And this movie is really sort of required reading for you and me. Our generation. Wouldn’t you say? We really kind of have to go.”

And so I did.

My friend was right in saying that I am one of those people the movie was made for.  I am the intended market.  I’m eleven years younger than Dylan, so just the right age to have been tuned in when his records were hitting the airways. I did not start with Dylan directly. My first appreciation of his work was unconscious. I loved the Byrd’s version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but I didn’t know or care who wrote it. I was too young to ask such questions. I just knew what I liked.

But, my appreciation grew. I think the first Dylan album I bought was “Blood on The Tracks,” which anyone will tell you is a pretty good place to start. Being a believer myself, I enthusiastically bought all three albums from the “gospel period,” and I still think those are very good records. I’ve been to two of his million live shows and found them underwhelming. Have no intention of ever going to another one.  Read his autobiographical Chronicles, and read and reviewed Scott Marshall’s excellent book, Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life.

I think all of that puts me in the category of a fan, but not a fanatic.

But I went to the movie, and here is what I saw.

Someone has said that good casting is the key to the life or death of a movie.  I think the casting in “A Complete Unknown” missed the mark. I know that there is a lot of breathless praise for this Timothee Chalamet guy – the voice, the looks. But it did not work for me.  I was totally on board with Gary Busey as Buddy Holly, and Joaquin Phoenix was a convincing Johnny Cash, but I did not see Dylan in Chalamet.  I’ll admit that, given Dylan’s enigmatic character, Chalamet had a more difficult job. But it is only sad when someone is aiming at being enigmatic and that is what I saw in this movie. So many of his lines were mumbled or muttered and lost on me. Makes me wonder if Dylan himself was not so much enigmatic as he was determined to appear enigmatic.

Likewise for Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez.  Barbaro is pretty and has a nice voice, but Baez was angelic. This would have been a hard mark to hit, but it was missed here.

For a story to involve the audience, the writer or actor must normally foster some sympathy for the main character. I didn’t get that here. Maybe it is because Dylan, viewed as a person and not as a songwriter, is not a very sympathetic guy. If the movie portrays his relationships with women anywhere near accurately, he certainly is not. He is impulsive, selfish, superficial, and inconsiderate at every turn. Seemingly lacking much in the way of self-awareness.  “Why do these women not like me? Why do they want to get away?”

The movie comes close to making you sympathetic to the women in his life, but it is hard to shake the notion that they, as portrayed, at least, are so stupid they deserve what they get.

In fact, as the movie tells it, these same egoistic characteristics seem to mark every sphere of Dylan’s life. He doesn’t care about those people who have nurtured his career and made him famous.  Pete Seeger comes across as a sincere, sensitive and well-meaning man. Dylan abuses him. He doesn’t care about his adoring fans. They are holding him back from something or another. Self-actualization?

All these people buying records and paying for tickets are somehow the bad guys, holding Bob back.  Poor Bobby! He’ll just rub their noses in it. Yeah.  Show them what a bunch of phonies they are. After all, he just couldn’t have chosen any forum other than a folk festival to break out the Stratocaster, now, could he?

The only characters in the movie who are perfectly cast are Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton, and, particularly, Albert Grossman. Dan Fogler is convincing in that role.

The story attempted in “A Complete Unknown” is a very small part of the Dylan bio, but even at that, the movie attempts too much. Relationships are portrayed but are underdeveloped.  Surfaces are only skimmed.  There is little in the way of interesting, profound, or clever dialogue. Here is the movie’s defining moment of the relationship between Dylan and Baez. After a night of lovemaking:

Baez:            So, what is this?

Dylan:          (pauses) I don’t know.

But what is undeniable and perhaps even worth the price of the ticket is the showcasing of the songs.  The songs themselves, as they appear in the movie, are so strong, so vibrant, so still alive that they make everything else, the clunkiness of the production, the unseemliness of Dylan’s life, pale by comparison.  The point of it all, we must say, is the genius, for it is nothing less than that, of these masterpieces that are the touchstones, the very soundtrack of our lives. When he sings “The Times They Are A’Changin’” and the crowd rises as one man I get it. My spine still tingles.