Good morning. Today, my colleague Alissa Wilkinson writes about the new Bob Dylan film. We're also covering al-Assad's secret escape, pharmacy deserts and airplane movies. —David Leonhardt
Bob Dylan, revisited
My holiday season has been filled with parties, and as a movie critic, that has meant a lot of conversations about the big upcoming movie. This year there's a clear winner, at least at the events I've been attending. Someone sidles up to me, Negroni or Coke in hand, and asks, sotto voce, Have you seen the Bob Dylan movie? And then the follow-up: So is it any good? Yes, I have seen "A Complete Unknown," about Dylan's early years. And yes, though critical opinion has so far been somewhat divided, I quite liked it, as I mentioned in my recent essay on this year's big crop of movies set in New York. It looks great and plays slyly with some rocker biopic conventions. Plus, Timothée Chalamet makes a great Dylan, and Edward Norton is fantastic as Pete Seeger. The movie also prompted me to think more broadly about Bob Dylan onscreen. In fact, I spent the better part of the last two months watching every movie he appears in, and a few in which other people play him. Quality varies widely, and midway through I flirted with regret; there's a long stretch from the late 1980s to the early 2000s where they're outright abysmal. (If you want to be reminded of how bad a movie can be, try 2003's "Masked and Anonymous.") But it was fascinating to watch him, and the film industry, evolve. "Dont Look Back," the documentary by D.A. Pennebaker shot during Dylan's 1965 concert tour in England, is a bona fide landmark in American cinema, preserved in the Library of Congress. After that documentary, and some others, Dylan tried out acting and directing himself (with mostly unfortunate results). In recent years, filmmakers like Todd Haynes, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers have come at Dylan from other directions, all trying to capture a singer who never stays in one shape for very long. (Haynes's 2007 film "I'm Not There," for instance, uses six different actors to play versions of the singer, including Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale.) Throughout these 15 films, I found myself wondering: Why has Dylan proved so fascinating and, at times, elusive to filmmakers — even when the filmmaker is himself? That's more or less what "A Complete Unknown" is exploring. Its title is a nod to the film's thesis, one my Dylan binge bore out: He has spent his career purposely making himself unknowable. He appeared out of nowhere, told tall tales and messed with journalists, and radically shifted his musical style just as people were ready to anoint him king of folk music. He is, in other words, the consummate postmodern celebrity: lauded for authenticity but also seemingly totally unconcerned with it. I'm nowhere near as immersed in Dylanalia as some of my colleagues are, but I think this ability to try on a new identity — something the movie shows him defending — is probably what's made him endure for so long. With Dylan, you never quite know what you're getting, and he is in on the trick. I don't know if "A Complete Unknown" will ignite interest in Dylan among a new generation who turn out for Chalamet. But I'm certain that if it does, they'll still have to try to figure him out.
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