At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
—Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden”
James Mangold’s new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, opens with Dylan’s arrival on New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s. It is the latest entry in an informal canon of Dylan “biography” on screen and in print, which includes Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home (Mangold’s film picks up the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone” where the title of the documentary leaves off), and Dylan’s 2017 lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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