Bob Dylan's Carnival Act

His identity was a performance. His writing was sleight of hand. He bamboozled his own audience.

- James Parker

Everything, as Charles Péguy 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-workon-Maggie's-farm-no-more headlining appearance, four years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, where his new electric sound drove the old folkies berserk and the crowd (at least in Mangold's movie) bayed for his blood.

A Complete Unknown, like all the best movies about rock stars, is a fairy tale.