This isn’t a synopsis of the Bob Dylan movie that recently opened on Christmas Day. But I’d like to tell you how it affected me.

You need to know that from the time I was 17 I was hooked on Dylan’s music, ever since my then-boyfriend (I’ll call him “R”) played that debut album for me in 1963. (The record had been released in ’62 but took a while to get noticed.)

It changed my world.

I bought that album and played it incessantly. Tracks I particularly liked were “In My Time of Dyin'” (cool picking) and “Baby Let me Follow You Down” (also cool picking, and showed off his harmonica skills). I vividly remember my older brother yelling through my bedroom door, “Who is that?! He sounds like a sick cow!” A committed rock ‘n’ roll aficionado for life, my brother was never a Dylan fan.

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Hey, I used to like some rock music too, especially Buddy Holly, the Everlys, and even “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. But that was back in ’57-’59 or so, in their heyday. After the “day the music died,” when Holly was killed in that plane crash, I lost my taste for rock, for quite a while.

Then came a fallow period of bubble-gum pop songs. They took over the radio waves and spilled out of school dances in the gym. I was never crazy about them, I guess you can tell.

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But then I met “R.” I must credit him – a local folksinger himself – with opening up this world of music for me. The “new wave” of folk music along with its legion of fans had begun in the late ’50s,” with performers like the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Oscar Brand, and Woody Guthrie – an early idol of Dylan. I was determined to catch up with it all!

I bought a whole lot of vinyl. Grew my hair long (much to the chagrin of my more conventional parents). Okay, confession: I wanted to look like Joan Baez. Did I mention I bought a guitar and wanted to play like her, too? A girl can try, right? 😁

I accompanied “R” to the best coffeehouses and shows in town, and saw many fabulous folk and blues artists’ performances. It was mesmerizing.

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Okay, to the movie, A Complete Unknown. So here’s the thing: I lived through the era myself. I enjoyed all of Dylan’s songs on his many records I owned. I followed the highlights of his career during the period covered in the film (’62–’65) and beyond. I even went to the Newport Folk Festival with a pal – albeit one year after his infamous electric debacle – where I got to see Pete Seeger whittle a wooden recorder in a small workshop, and got this close to him. 😅

So… you could say that I watched this movie with quite a critical eye. I did appreciate that they included a lot of Dylan’s songs he wrote in those early years. For many moments it brought me back, especially in the coffeehouse scenes and later at the Newport Festival.

I thought Timothée Chalamet did an excellent job impersonating Dylan. (I’ve seen documentary footage of Bob.) His speech patterns, the way he moved, even his singing and guitar-playing were very similar.

But in fact, as I said, I was silently, unconsciously “assessing” the film for inaccuracies.

We saw a “Sylvie” standing in for Dylan’s girlfriend of those very early years, Suze Rotolo. By the way, here’s a plug for her own memoir of that time, called A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. I’m still savouring it slowly.

I was not happy with the way the film portrays Dylan in his relationships with both “Sylvie” – and later, Joan Baez. The film showed us a man not very involved with either of them emotionally. In fact, he takes up with Joan while still living with Suze. I mean Sylvie. We never see any affection shared between him and his girlfriends. He’d pop over to this place or that place, her place or her place, guitar almost always in hand, and then cut to the morning as one of them gets out of a rumpled bed to go do… something. Or, more often, he is shown in the middle of the night sitting in boxer shorts at a table, by the light of a lamp, scribbling lyrics on a torn piece of paper, feeling out chords on the guitar, while she (whoever it is) sleeps alone in the (rumpled) bed.

Dylan’s way of relating to people in general seems rather superficial, brusque, or even hostile at times. It made me even wonder, seeing Chalamet as Dylan, mumbling his way through this movie, was Bob on the spectrum? Who knows, right? Asperger’s – genius level, I’m thinking now! And furthermore…

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…Isn’t it true that many geniuses have had, to be kind, difficulty with close relationships? Genius-level work, to be sure. I’m thinking of:

• Picasso
• Steve Jobs
• Stephen Hawking
• Albert Einstein

The more I consider this, the more I feel sure that Bob Dylan belongs in this group. And yes, we know he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and fully deserved it. His later songs in particular, the lyrics, are astounding.

Look, the movie did a great job harnessing the look, feel and sound of the era. All of that rang true. I guess I just had trouble equating the Nobel god with his behaviour that didn’t seem, well, noble.

In closing – do yourself a favour. Relax, just listen to this song. Wait until the last verse. Wait for it. And then weep with me.