Bob Dylan's latest mask is named after Timothée Chalamet

The facts of the life and work of Bob Dylan that puts on stage A complete stranger They have been told so many times (for example, in Elijah Wald's book Dylan goes electric!, the starting point for Jay Cocks' script) that have ended up acquiring the mythical texture of fiction. In fact, the way in which James Mangold presents some situations – the improvised intervention of Al Kooper as organist in the recording of Like a rolling stone, or the scandal caused by Dylan and his band's over-the-top recital at the Newport festival, a bastion of folk tradition – pursues the same complicit tickling as the quotes that superhero films make in their pregnant vignettes. In other words: the realistic appearance of the film is a mirage behind which we find a fable that, in essence, is not far from the masquerade ball that Todd Haynes orchestrated in I'm not there, where the Dylanesque mystery was embodied in different forms.

A complete stranger He assumes, therefore, that he cannot reveal truly intimate corners of his central figure, but he does a fairly convincing job when it comes to working with his aura. The beginning of the film does not hide the little physical resemblance that exists between Dylan and Timothée Chalamet, but when the story reaches the time when the artist began to cultivate an elusive gesture and hide his gaze behind sunglasses (as immortalized in DA Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back), the mimesis is total. Mangold, for his part, succeeds in making the songs the center of gravity that outlines the relationships between the characters (and if, in reality, we were faced with a musical disguised as biopic?), and in focusing not so much on the personal drama (the triangle formed by Dylan, Sylvie Russo and Joan Baez) as on the aesthetic and ethical debate of an artist who, at a key moment in his career, had to decide between being the voice of a generation or conquering a space of individual freedom.