I'm mostly okay now, nine months on, like I've given birth to a new version of myself, or the world has been birthed anew without my father in it. Oh, I know he's there with me, all the time, ra ra ra, though I call bullshit on that, because any Dad-like presence is just my mind forming tricks. The closest I get to his is-ness is in my dreams, where my neural networks form him into something much less ethereal, much less distracted. It's rare though, this dream father. I never know when to expect him, but settle immediately into being with him, rather than the initial suprise he'd turned up in my dreamscape.

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But sometimes, oh! The brutality of a memory can knock you sideways, hands over the eyes, trembling and sobbing, with Jamie bringing me a tissue and letting me go. One of these grief paroxysms got me last weekend watching 'A Complete Unknown', the Dylan film with Timothy Chalamet. Sheesh. There's Dylan walking into the room where Woody Guthrie sits with Pete Seeger and he gestures for the young Bobby to play something. It's the moment where you shift from your focus on Chalamet to Dylan, because the actor has managed to capture his essence so well.

'I wrote this for you', Dylan says, and I know immediately what song it is before he begins.

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born

There's me set to a-crying before the movies even a-begun. Dylan's singing about Guthrie's world of peasants and paupers and kings and he's evoking that time but he's also tunefully raising memories of Dad, who loved Dylan, not just the old folk songs he begun with but all his later stuff too. Dad moved with the times, you see, he didn't get stuck with the music he loved as a young man. Even in the last week of his death he was listening to music he'd never heard before. 'Not enough time for all the music', he said, with only a twinge of regret, knowing the impossibility of it. So for me, Dylan is irrevocably tied up with Dad, and childhood memory, and the emotional connection I have to a lot of his music.

The film shows a Dylan that rises meteorlike through the folk scene, coming up with anthems of the era - The Times They Are a-Changing, Mr Tambourine Man, Masters of War - and then becoming a traitor, a Judas, by picking up the electric guitar, as he did at the Newport Folk Festival, much to the disgust of the musicians trying to preserve the integrity of the people's folk. Dylan was not a man who liked being told what to do.

Jamie hates Dylan. My Dad took him to see him live, to prove that the man was a master. He came on the stage and to this day I recall clear as day my father looking at me and saying 'my hero!'. That gig was a disaster - we walked out half way through. Dylan isn't known for the consistancy of his performance or people pleasing. We'd seen him years earlier with Patti Smith, and he was brilliant. I do love this about the man. I love how he didn't turn up to the award ceremony for recieving the Nobel Prize for Literature. I loved how this would have rubbed the right people up the wrong way.

The film also focussed on his relationship with Joan Baez, which I didn't know much about. It struck me I don't really focus on the lives of musicians, only their music. Art speaks to me fully formed, rather than the life of the artist that gave birth to it. The other female relationship was with a fictional character - I wondered why they chose to do that. Was Dylan's story not interesting enough? A little post film research made me realise that a few Baez songs were Dylan songs, and a few Dylan songs were about Baez. I don't know if I needed to know that, especially with mine and Dad's favourite, Visions of Johanna - we played a Chris Smither's version at Dad's funeral, which was fucking brilliant.

You might not like Dylan - like Jamie, who hates his nasally voice - but you gotta appreciate the man lived in a world of saying what he wanted, and not really caring what others thought.

“200 people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should just let me be.”

The film made me wonder whether he was on some spectrum or another, not that it matters much, but it's an interesting thought.

Was the film worth watching? Yes. Chalamet is fantastic. I loved Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. There's a funny scene where Johnny Cash tries to get a car drunkenly out of a car park - and if there's anything more punk that Johnny at that time, I'd like to know. Their duet of 'Girl From the North Country' is one of my favourites. If you're not particularly a Dylan fan, it's worth watching if you like musical biopics, like I do. Ultimately it's a historical film too, given the time he's bringing us this music. The setting is fantastic - Dylan films will recognise album covers made into animated scenes.

Even Jamie was caught tapping his feet on some of the earlier tunes, much to my delight - and goodness, how I wanted to ring Dad and tell him that.

Also, a side note, which probably should be front and centre, was that Chalamet performed all of Dylan's songs himself, in order to capture a more authentic portrayal. Now that's worth watching just for that fact! Here's Chalamet doing the famous Highway 61 Revisited. I could talk alot about Dylan's music, and the people who covered him - like Geelong's Adalita doing 'I Want You' or Cat Power's album, or the extraordinary lyrics he wrote, but you're either a Dylan fan or you're not, and if you're not, you've already moved on, and if you are, you can join me in the comments for chat.

With Love,

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