Bound To Fall

But please go anyway

It is very hard to say anything about Bob Dylan without pissing people off, and James Mangold’s movie A Complete Unknown, has, inevitably, pissed people off. It has been mostly well-reviewed, but boy, do its detractors detract. And, as usual with Dylan, there is a lot of fun to be had watching the bizarre shapes people twist themselves into as they express their rage and sense of betrayal.

Here are a few quotes, taken from reviews of the film here on Substack and elsewhere, and it’s hard not to imagine that their authors went into the cinema with anger in their hearts, determined to find something, anything, to dislike. What is one to make of this, for example? “Chalamet communes with Dylan’s spirit so effectively that — paradoxical as this might sound — his embodiment can’t help but expose the futility of trying to do so.” Or this? “It leans too heavily on the idea that history revealed that Bob was right rather than to search for reasons why he might have been wrong.”