Column | Together to Bob Dylan

For a few weeks I resisted the temptation for the biopic A Complete Unknown About the young life of Bob Dylan. I don't like biopics because the main character's charisma can never be satisfactory by an actor. But this actor, Timothée Chalamet, works great, I heard from all sides.

Only when I collapsed another motive for this cinema visit: my wife. She had been a Dylan fan of the first hour in the sixties. When I got to know her in 1966, she made me hear two elpees from Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin ' and Another Side of Bob Dylan. I thought it was 'separate music' – always a doubtful compliment – but I continued to prefer my own taste, which was more with rock and soul.

Especially on that nagging voice of Dylan and his sometimes dark texts, I had to get used to it. Only a while later, when I listened to it again, I realized how separate – in the sense of special quality – the first records of Dylan had been: I consider them the best of his work, which could be disappointing later.

They are still in my record cabinet, those two elpees with a slightly grumpy -looking Dylan on the cover. The plates were allowed to stay, but the buyer had to go sixty years later: to the nursing home. My wife no longer knows who Bob Dylan is, but his music might still be vaguely known to her. Why not tried it? The duration of the film, almost two and a half hours, argued against it: so almost immobile on a narrow cinema chair, could I do that to her? But we could always leave if it took too long? Who does not dare do not enjoy.

And there we were, in one of the rear rows with places on the outside, so that we could get away quickly if needed. But it wasn't necessary at all. When I looked aside carefully, or looked for her hand, she was watching fascinated, without falling asleep occasionally.

She will not have realized that she was watching an actor who was sucking Bob Dylan and Nazong, but what did that matter? It must have been an ideal film for her: lots of beautiful, excellent sung music and an easy -to -follow story about the creation of a phenomenon. My objections to the Biopic did not stand here.

The Dylankers have pointed to the freedoms that director James Mangold has allowed himself to be biographically. I was able to live well with it, except with the procedure that Dylan himself had demanded: that his first great love, Suze Rotolo, could not occur under her proper name in the film. He wanted to protect the now deceased Rotolo because she had never participated in the music scene. I don't trust that argument, because Rotolo did want to talk about Dylan in the documentary No Direction Home From 2005 from Martin Scorsese. With a wink there she calls him a smart man who knew how to win important people for his talent. Was Dylan's late revenge?

« How did you find it? » I asked my wife afterwards. « Beautiful, » she said with full conviction. We quickly went to eat something across the street before I had to bring her back to the nursing home, because the times have also changed for us.

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