“A Complete Unknown” Shears Off Vital Details in the Life of a Colossal, Complicated Artist

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One doesn’t have to be a Dylanologist to know, or even to sense, that “A Complete Unknown,” which opens on December 25th, simplifies Bob Dylan’s early professional life and dilutes its furies. To a certain extent, it hardly matters: Dylan is such a distinctive artist and a fascinating personality that, even smoothed out, he’s still unusually sharp-edged, at least by Hollywood standards. The intrinsic pleasures of “A Complete Unknown”—a story of Dylan’s arrival in New York...