Even if you've heard the songs ten-thousand times, one of the many remarkable things about "A Complete Unknown" is remembering - or reliving - the sensation of hearing them for the first time.
People who tear up just watching the trailer for this Bob Dylan biopic will know what I'm talking about.
People who don't - including a couple of generations who weren't around yet - have a lot to learn from writer-director James Mangold's magnificent retelling of Dylan's early years. They span his 1961 arrival in Greenwich Village and pilgrimage to the bedside of dying Woody Guthrie, to the Newport Folk Festival where he upended the folk music world he had championed by going electric in 1965.
The movie features incredible Golden Globe-nominated performances - more like feats of channeling - by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, along with Monica Barbaro doing a wonderful Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as long-suffering girlfriend Sylvia Russo.
But the film's real "star" is the music, rather than the prickly personality of this honky tonk American demigod destined to win a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and to still be performing on his endless tour well into his 80s.
With all the stars doing their own singing, "A Complete Unknown" is a chills-up-the-spine musical treasure chest, overflowing with dozens of the greatest songs ever written. Viewers of my generation will thrill witnessing the moment of creation of songs that changed history, over and over. Not only are the songs born anew, but still images - album cover photos in particular, stared at for years - come to life before our eyes.
Backgrounds, too - Greenwich Village, Manhattan apartments, recording studios and penthouses; outdoor folk festivals from Newport to Monterey - shine, seemingly in the light generated by the idealism of that brief American moment. Filmmaker Mangold's beautiful film pulses with energy amid all the impeccably observed period details.
Burning with ambition when he arrived in New York, 19-year-old Bobby Dylan had a new name and fanciful stories of traveling with carney shows instead of true accounts of his upbringing as Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota. A slave of his music, he was hardly ready when the fame he had sought descended on him overnight.
His genius and intuition were once-in-a-generation gifts. His psyche and temperament were made of flimsier stuff ... even though he was almost as good at wisecracking as he was at writing songs.
"You know, you're kind of an asshole," Joan Baez tells him shortly after they get together.
That doesn't stop them from making beautiful music together, amidst all the other exhilarating performances on screen.
The tension between Dylan's almighty gift and his his very human difficulties handling it make "A Complete Unknown" unlike other music biopics. Fans know lots of the details already. Every time Bob climbs on his Triumph, we know where he's heading.
Time has always been Dylan's "thing." He's a physicist as much as a poet in understanding the nature of change. The songs he wrote in the film's time frame were astounding for summing up everything, from romantic love to geopolitics, in words everyone knew were true the first time we heard them. It was Dylan, rather than our teachers in school, who educated us.
Sixty years later, at the other end of the timeline, his lyrics are just as just as immediate, just as profound, just as funny.
Bob Dylan was, and is, the voice of our culture in our time.
There's no way this movie can't be an homage and tribute, but it doesn't glorify.
Instead, it's more honest ... more interesting ... more ambiguous ...
For all the books, PhD dissertations and decades of efforts to know the man behind the voice, Bob Dylan remains as elusive and enigmatic as ever. There's no "answer" to what, or who, he is.
He just is.
"A Complete Unknown" is just a new way of connecting some of the dots, resulting in a wonderfully alive film experience, a musical thrill show, a return to our youth.
When it opens in theaters Christmas Day, I imagine I won't have been the only one sitting through the final credits just to hear the songs one more time.
