A second-best Bob Dylan moment

I wanna be Bob Dylan.

— Counting Crows

Tara and I decided to celebrate the holidays this year by taking in the Christmas Day release of the James Mangold-directed Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” which is based on the Elijah Wald book “Dylan Goes Electric.”

Tara, of course, loves Dylan with a passion and has warned me that she’d drop me like a hot potato, real quick and in a hurry, if she got the opportunity to hook up with the singer/greatest songwriter ever. I’m just big enough a Dylan fan to say I completely understand.

When I first read about “Unknown,” I had my doubts. I mean, they’re going to let some relatively unknown actor not only play the living legend, but instead of dubbing Dylan’s unique voice, they decide to let Timothée Chalamet sing the familiar tunes? (Same goes for veteran actor Edward Norton, who plays one of Dylan’s folk-singer heroes, Pete Seeger.)

The music, of course, is the star of the film, but by the time the story nears the climactic scene of Dylan stunning fans by playing electric instruments with a band at the Newport Folk Festival, Chalamet has long since won you over. As you see him walking down a lonely New York street or backlit onstage singing with Joan Baez, an equally doppelganger of a performance by Monica Barbaro, you’re reluctance to accept anyone as Dylan has vanished.

Chalamet is outstanding in the role — I predict an Oscar nomination, if they still do the Oscars … I really don’t know — and it’s easy to believe he reportedly became so immersed in the role, fellow cast members called him “Bob Dylan” on set. He learned to play guitar, piano and harmonica for the movie and ended up doing vocals on 40 Dylan songs.

Dylan-lover Tara’s take on the film: I think every brilliant writer, musician, true artist of any kind, has to have certain levels of audacity and ego to put their work on display, hope that people love it, then reject the idea of fame and the adoration of strangers. The movie was set in the perfect period of Dylan’s career to show this bit of evolution. Chalamet portrayed Dylan’s unwitting effect on everyone around him with a coy confidence that made him believable, even to a hard-core fan like me.

I’ve seen Dylan perform live five times, and one thing you learn about the enigmatic superstar is that you never know which Dylan you’ll get on any given night. Before one Atlanta performance, he made it known that if any photographers showed up in the photo pit in front of the stage for his performance, he would walk off. Indeed, each of the shows I saw bore out the “which Dylan will be performing tonight” warning, but as I told one person (who will go unnamed) who walked out on a Dylan show because he didn’t think that performance met his expectations, “But this is Dylan!”

My favorite Dylan performance occurred in Columbus, Ga., of all places. I didn’t believe the announcement that he was actually going to perform there, and apparently a lot of others didn’t either. The Columbus Civic Center, which has about a 9,000-seat capacity for concerts, had maybe 7,000 people show up for the concert. If the superstar performer was bummed by the empty seats, he didn’t show it.

At the concert, there was a rowdy bunch of young Dylan fans in front of the stage, and they spent the entire evening grooving to Dylan’s music, dancing and shouting their love throughout the evening. Late in the show, the usually reserved performer started to connect with the group, and there was a back-and-forth that was electric. When Dylan left after his performance, this rowdy group clamored for an encore, which the great artist supplied. In fact, he became so immersed in his performance, he played on well past the announced show time.

As the singer finished each song, the entire audience — but especially the group up front — kept screaming for more. And Dylan obliged. 

After a series of encores, when it appeared the singer had no plans to leave the stage, officials at the Civic Center blinked the lights as a sign that showtime was over. Dylan kept playing. After another couple of songs, officials at the venue turned on the lights.

Dylan kept playing.

Finally, deciding that this man was going to play through the night, venue technicians cut the power to the stage, sending everyone who had stayed through the show home euphorically spent.

That was my favorite Dylan moment. “A Complete Unknown” is now my second. Music lovers, go and see for yourselves.