I'm very torn on this--it's a solid, enjoyable film, held up above its pretty by-the-numbers biopicness by some completely great performances and excellent treatment of the music. But it's not the film. It doesn't capture it all, doesn't even begin to say what can be said about Dylan, about the era his early music defined (and defines), about the Greenwich folk scene he rose through and left behind; about the turns and counter-turns of the 1960s, the beginning of the…

I was always going to be this film's target audience, I suppose, both in general and at this specific time of life. But still, and even if the circumstances of watching it might have heightened the experience a bit--a spontaneous walk-in off the street at the end of a long, slightly odd day, in a cinema with some personal significance--it's true, I did absolutely adore this. A day on, and I still feel fairly soaked in it.

It's a film…

I arrived 10 minutes late to the cinema for the start of this film, and though I managed to pick up exactly what and who and when was going on very quickly -- and 10 minutes is only a drop in the ocean of this thing's mammoth runtime -- it was only after getting out of the screen and talking about it with the others that I realised that missing those opening minutes had probably shaped my entire reaction to…