Marty Supreme

 

Director Josh Safdie 

Timothée Chalamet on the set

Safdie with Timothée Chalamet

Darius Khondji on the set

Tokyo set

Marty Reisman, 1946

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARTY SUPREME              B-                                                                                         Finland  USA  (150 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Josh Safdie

I have a purpose.  You don’t.  And if you think that’s some kind of blessing, it’s not.  It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.  And with that obligation comes sacrifice. 
—Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet)

A bit of a hot mess, a sprawling, anxiety-ridden, and extremely over-produced film with loud, instrusive music by composer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) that plays throughout, though there’s an exquisite use of popular songs of the 1980’s, also synthesizer sounds from the same era, opening and closing with Tears for Fears, but the original score offers no hint of subtlety, as if the entire film is a remix video.  Made by Josh Safdie, the first time not working with his younger brother Benny, the makers of Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), excelling in expressing that New York City vibe, where this has the same frantic, adrenaline-laced energy, loosely inspired by the life of early 1950’s ping pong aficionado Marty Reisman ("Marty Reisman – US Table Tennis Hall of Fame") and his book, The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler (1974), where in the 40’s and 50’s, New York City table tennis was a collection of misfits and gamblers, where betting on the game drove the sport, with a talented player able rake in hundreds in a single night, which would be the equivalent of thousands today.  There already is a documentary made about the flamboyant Reisman, Leo Leigh’s FACT OR FICTION: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A PING PONG HUSTLER (2014).  The hustler aspect of the sport recalls the eloquent pool playing grace of Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats, the best player in the world, and Paul Newman’s rising star Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), though this doesn’t come close to the tension-filled, insatiably-interesting character study of that memorable film, which perfectly captured the stench and dingy atmosphere of the smoke-filled poolroom.  The raison d’être of this film is Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, so good in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), who has secretly been preparing for this role for six or seven years, continually training and becoming familiar with the game, even traveling with a table while he worked on other films, creating a fictionalized portrait of the most flamboyantly charismatic table tennis player the world has ever witnessed, whose live-wire approach carries nearly every scene of the film, literally careening from place to place.  Written by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, who both co-edited the film as well, this becomes a collaborative effort in creating an immersive portrait of what’s commonly known as a bullshit artist that feels like a psychotic-driven, impressionistic mosaic of neverending mood swings.  While ostensibly about ping pong, the protagonist feels more like the volatile and ferociously temperamental chess champion Bobby Fischer of table tennis, both viewing the game as nothing less than armed combat, as the film reveals just how difficult it was to build a career around a sport that still hadn’t caught on in the United States.  Table tennis didn’t become an Olympic sport until 1988 (no American has ever medaled), so Marty had to go to great lengths to hustle money in the most unorthodox of ways, bordering on criminality, to finance his dream of becoming a world champion, knowing he was talented enough, but finding his way into international tournaments on the other side of the world was another story.

Listed at #2 at IndieWire: The 25 Best Movies of 2025, and #3 at The Playlist: The 25 Best Films of 2025 and New York Times: Manohla Dargis: Best Movies of 2025, it’s all about having a single-minded purpose, as we initially find Marty, a Lower East Side Jewish kid stuck working in his uncle’s shoestore, where we hear him bragging that he could sell shoes to an amputee, taking a break from fitting women’s shoes to have a backroom tryst with his childhood sweetheart, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to someone else that treats her badly, exuding passion in everything he does as he desperately tries to raise the money to afford airfare to England to play in their invitational.  Crossing the line at every turn, Marty justifies his deplorable antics by thinking the ends justify the means, but not everyone else sees it that way, as he’s a natural born street hustler and swindler, where many are swayed by his charms, including Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a retired Hollywood movie actress from the 30’s on the verge of A Streetcar Named Desire theatrical comeback, who he sees across the room in a fancy restaurant at the Ritz in London, finagling his way into her hotel room, where she doesn’t know whether to call security or embrace his hare-brained schemes, as he exudes such a sense of feverish urgency that she’s inevitably drawn into his youthful sexual orbit, actions she later regrets.  Invariably, it’s her incredibly wealthy and supremely successful businessman husband that peaks his interest, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), thinking opportunity knocks as he sees dollar signs, playing out like some twisted and demented version of the American Dream, with Marty trying to promote his own idea of orange-colored ping pong balls entitled Marty Supreme, with the words “Made in America” printed underneath the name, thinking this will change the game, as a white ball against white shirts is hard to see.  While Marty is supremely confident, to the point of arrogance and cockiness, he’s also deluded and self-destructive, prone to creating chaos wherever he goes, thinking Rockwell should just throw money at him, as he’s such a sure bet, but Marty shoots down all his offers that are little more than an excuse to promote his own business product, using Marty as an exhibition act to help sell his world-acclaimed pens, a proposal Marty finds deeply offensive, always believing that he’s the star, not some novelty act playing second fiddle, so these discussions are a little rocky, with the businessman quickly losing patience on this unproven commodity.  It’s only a matter of time, however, before Marty’s life deteriorates into utter mayhem, having to deal with one disaster after another, finding himself destitute and all alone, where playing ping pong is the only thing that he’s actually good at, supremely confident in his abilities, just oozing with braggadocio, belittling others as not in his same league, described in the press as “the Chosen One,” bragging that he is “the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” where he’s a consummate trash talker before the phrase was even invented, something Mohammad Ali elevated to an artform in the sport of boxing in the 1960’s.  Shot on 35mm in ‘Scope by Darius Khondji, who shot the brother’s previous film, this tries to recreate the nuances of the early 50’s, with some degree of success, but mostly this is shot indoors in claustrophobic hotel rooms, small spaces, or cavernous arenas with multiple ping pong matches being played at once.         

What’s important to understand is that the sport itself is overlooked, small, and dismissed, yet the film is driven by Marty’s relentless obsession to be the best ping pong player in the world, which may as well be the ambitious pursuit of flying men to the moon, as it just fails to register with anyone else around him, who see it as little more than a hobby.  At the time, American players met in dingy basements on the margins of anything resembling a sport other than maybe high-stakes poker, while attracting large crowds filling stadiums in Europe and Asia.  Yet for all the negativity he encounters, it only drives him more, hustling his way from table tennis tables in New York to Paris, Tokyo, and even the Great Pyramids of Egypt, shamelessly chipping off a souvenir from one of the giant blocks at the base and handing it to his mother, reminding her, “We built that” (a common misconception), where the film is defined by his daring physicality, putting himself on the line, creating a fully-charged persona that lives on the edge, that thrives in adversity, where he’s a bit of a showman, doing trick shots for curious spectators who are in awe of his unleashed talent, as he was known for using a Coke bottle for a paddle, or a garbage-can lid, a shoe, a light bulb, his eyeglasses, while making behind-the-back or under-the-leg returns, Marty Supreme Exclusive Clip - Semifinals (2025) YouTube (2:08).  His pièce de résistance was to place a cigarette at the opposite end of the table and then, crushing the ball with his powerful forehand, break the cigarette in two.  The entire film is an adrenaline rush, thwarted at every turn, denied the opportunities of a lifetime, so he just doubles down on his dream, where his deluded sense of entitlement is distinctly American, yet his sharp wit, brash impulsiveness, astonishingly cruel and inappropriate language, and giant-sized ego will simply not be denied, matched only by his superlative talent.  A narcissist in development, the changing parts all around him are a revolving door of whoever happens to benefit him the most, as he’s constantly charging ahead, like a bull in a China shop, where calamities are an everyday occurrence, harming anyone and everyone around him, but he refuses to let that stop him.  This gargantuan obsession with a dream both propels and consumes him, where at times it feels like a demolition derby, as it’s an exhausting journey built around a transformative performance by Chalamet, an inveterate liar and relentless scoundrel who’s always working the angles, but continuously gets sidetracked by a myriad of side journeys that lead to personal disasters and self-inflicted catastrophes.  The problem is there’s not an ounce of self-reflection in the film, no pauses to think and re-evaluate how best to get his life on track in order to achieve his real purpose and main goal.  Hell, we never once even see the man practice or train, so apparently he just expects to win, like wishful thinking.  Despite spending two and a half hours in what amounts to a psychological character study with one central character onscreen nearly the entire time, in the end we still know next to nothing about him, while none of the secondary characters are allowed to have their own developed lives apart from Marty, instead they disappear just as quickly as they are seen.  What that leaves is a pervasive emptiness that, despite the whirlwind of kinetic energy, saturates the mood of the entire film.    

One of the more amazing stories comes from Marty’s friend Béla Kletzki (Hungarian actor and poet Géza Röhrig, who starred in the acclaimed 2015 László Nemes Holocaust movie Son of Saul (Saul Fia), a former Hungarian table tennis star from the 30’s, who survived Auschwitz when he was recognized by a German prison guard on his way to the gas chambers, then sent to defuse bombs on the camp outskirts, which is based on what actually happened to Polish player Alojzy Ehrlich (Alojzy Ehrlich: The Jewish Table Tennis Champion Who ...).  While there are some extraordinary shots of tournament play, accentuated by some exceptional production design by the legendary Jack Fisk, who over the past 50 years has worked with Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, he runs into one particularly difficult opponent who becomes his nemesis, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, a 26-year-old real-life deaf table tennis champion from Japan), reportedly deaf as a result of the American firebombing of Tokyo, who has the entire Japanese nation behind him, a powerful outlet for national pride and identity in the postwar Japanese recovery, who are simply enthralled with his abilities.  Endo’s fictional character is based upon Hiroji Satoh, who won the World Table Tennis Championship in 1952.  While barely touched upon in the film, Endo’s prowess is largely due to the changed racket design, with a sponge-covered foam rubber on one side instead of a hard paddle, allowing him to place more spin and achieve greater speed than a traditional paddle, while also muting the sound that players take a lifetime to be able to detect, like getting a jump on a fly ball to the outfield in baseball.  At first this flummoxes Marty, as he’s never encountered this before, and it takes some time before he develops an answer.  This revolutionary development in paddles actually became a bone of contention with the real Marty Reisman, eschewing it as “fraud and deception” because overnight, former champions were suddenly reduced to has-beens, preferring the challenges of an original wood design, claiming it required greater skill.  This same argument happened in the game of tennis, as the wood rackets in the Rod Laver era gave way to the steel rackets of Jimmy Connors, as both he and Billy Jean King dominated the sport afterwards.  While this is a typical Safdie Brothers’ roller coaster thrill ride designed to be a crowdpleaser, where it’s relentlessly volatile at every turn, not sure it amounts to much more than that, despite being A24’s most expensive film to date, with the studio pulling out all the stops in a ridiculous, multi-month promotional campaign in an attempt to capture mainstream appeal, however, detours into violence and family melodrama feel like unnecessary distractions, with a less than scintillating and highly conventional finale leading to an epic Tears for Fears song over the end credits, yet the corrosive personality of the alienated protagonist does feel like a counterpoint to the Coen Brothers’ time capsule depiction of the early, pre-Dylan Greenwich Village folk scene of Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).      

Note

Easy to miss is director Abel Ferrara (a dangerous criminal, of course), and brief cameo appearances by Fran Drescher (Marty’s mother), Sandra Bernhard (her friend living downstairs), New York–based author Larry “Ratso” Sloman as Marty’s shoestore-owning uncle, billionaire grocery store mogul John Catsimatidis as the father of a friend, rap artist Tyler, the Creator as Marty’s cab-driving friend, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi as Kay’s publicist who gets theater tickets for Marty, prolific writer Naomi Fry as Kay’s assistant, novelist Pico Iyer as head of the International Table Tennis Association, playwright David Mamet (an actual ping pong hustler in his early years) as a theater director, comedian Penn Jillette as a hair-trimmed, kick-ass farmer, high-wire act Philippe Petit as an MC, multiple medal-winning German table tennis champion Timo Boll, Hall of Fame NBA legend George “the Iceman” Gervin as a table tennis club owner, and also NBA greats Tracy McGrady and Kemba Walker as Harlem Globetrrotters.  The real-life Marty Reisman died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two.

A Complete Unknown

 

Director James Mangold

Dylan in Columbia Studios, 1965

recreation of Cafe Wha? nightclub on MacDougal Street

The director on the set with Timothée Chalamet

The director with Monica Barbaro

Timothée Chalamet on his infamous motorcycle

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN            B                                                                                    USA  (141 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: James Mangold

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?                                                                                                To be without a home                                                                                                                  Like a complete unknown,                                                                                                              Like a rolling stone?                                                                                                                        —excerpt from Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan, 1965, Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone (Live at Newport 1965) YouTube (6:12)

Taking a deep dive back into the early 60’s, which spawned an entire generation, this is essentially a time capsule reflecting the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the Civil Rights movement, where linking it all together was the music and cultural impact of Bob Dylan, as his music was everywhere, literally everywhere you turned at the time, with stories continually being written about him, where he was described as “the voice of a generation.” The first songwriter to win the Nobel prize for literature in 2016 since Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, it’s his prolific output of poetic, counterculture songs that become the focus of the film, not any biographical portrait, but one that allows his enigmatic yet elegiac lyrics to speak for him, many songs allowed to unravel in their entirety, as unlike the traditional lyrics that came before him, his songs and lyrics were highly personal.  Revered and idolized, becoming the poster child for the 60’s counterculture movement with songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963) YouTube (2:35) and A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall (5:59) from 1962, Masters of War, Bob Dylan - Masters of War (4:30) from 1963, and The Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan - The Times They Are a-Changin' [LIVE IN ... YouTube (3:28) from 1964, which were able to influence a generation with deeply profound lyrics that blended a stream-of-conscious, image-laden lyricism with the traditional folksy sound.  By the time the free love movement was in full swing in the late 60’s, Bob Dylan's words were anthems for peace, and Dylan had become the voice of a social movement, elevated to an oracle of 1960’s youth culture.  Largely due to his connections with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Dylan embodied the ideals of the folk revival, a young teenage drifter arriving from the Midwest, singing traditional songs he had learned in his travels and writing new songs about the trials, troubles, and tribulations of the world around him, yet most revered were his songs of social consciousness, which were labeled protest songs, a term he disdained, yet as the children of the Sixties tried to crown Bob Dylan their poet laureate, he refused, as he was that rare celebrity who scoffed at all attempts to exaggerate his importance.  He didn’t even play at Woodstock, although he lived there.  In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Dylan complained of how “rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest” showed up in Woodstock.  He said he “had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.” (Newsweek cover: Bob Dylan opens up; Exclusive book excerpt ...).  But like a hipster alienated by his rejection of the mainstream, Dylan remained the voice of a generation precisely by refusing, and what this film brilliantly captures is his essential unknowability, making this a fascinating watch.  Shot in ‘Scope by Phedon Papamichael Jr. on various locations in New Jersey recreating the small clubs in New York’s Greenwich Village of the 60’s, adapted by Mangold and Jay Cocks, who has worked with Martin Scorsese and been a critic for Rolling Stone magazine, from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, an author who earlier wrote How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (2009) and co-authored Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2005).  It may come as a surprise to some that more young people today have probably seen actor Timothée Chalamet on social media or in his movies than have ever seen Bob Dylan in his lifetime, which is hard to imagine for a performer who has been playing in front of audiences for over 60 years.  As the film kept getting pushed back from 2020 due to Covid and then the Actors’ strike, it gave Chalamet several years to learn the subtle nuances of not just how to sing and talk like Dylan, fully inhabiting his sullen presence, but also learn to play the guitar and harmonica.

While the definitive Dylan movie remains D. A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back (1967), other contenders are Dylan as an actor in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Martin Scorsese’s exhaustively researched No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), and a few oddball movies like Todd Haynes’ abstract rendition in I’M NOT THERE (2007), which uses multiple actors to portray Dylan’s different public personas without ever mentioning him by name, or showing up rather anonymously where we least expect to find him in the struggling folk scene depicted in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).  While the acting performances are surprisingly good, especially Timothée Chalamet doing his Brandoesque mumbling imitation of Dylan, as his singing while playing guitar on all songs recorded live brings that same rough edge, while in contrast, Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for lip syncing Ray Charles, and Rami Malek won an Oscar for lip syncing Queen’s Freddie Mercury.  Edward Norton is the infinitely likeable, venerable folk legend Pete Seeger, where much of this version of Dylan is seen through his lofty eyes, while Monica Barbaro plays a sensuously feisty version of accomplished folk star Joan Baez, and Elle Fanning is his underappreciated girlfriend of the time Sylvie Russo, based on artist and activist Suze Rotolo, one of the few characters in his inner circle who remained out of the spotlight, seen on the cover of the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and author of the 2008 memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, which was used as source material.  It’s worth mentioning that some of Dylan’s best work was conceived when they were together, as she obviously had a great influence on his state of mind, yet she’s never gotten the credit she deserves for shaping Dylan and his work.  In the two-and-a-half years they dated he wrote most of his overtly political songs, where the politics, in particular, were hers, as her parents were members of the Communist Party, while she was a full-time volunteer with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), the anti-nuclear group SANE, and she also worked on a production of songs by Bertolt Brecht, which made a lasting impact on Dylan’s writing.  While it’s clear she was the inspiration behind some of his best love songs, she also witnessed his complete transformation from a relatively obscure folk performer playing in small, intimate spaces to a massively recognizable celebrity who couldn’t go anywhere in public without being mobbed by frenzied fans, which left her conflicted, as the internalized tension it caused took its toll on their relationship, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN | "One of a Kind" Official Clip ... YouTube (1:14).  The 1960’s were a period of dramatic upheaval, where the optimism of the early decade had been shaken by an escalating series of murders, assassinations, and riots, something this film never addresses, and is instead merely a historical backdrop.  Made by the man who directed the wildly uneven yet fully entertaining Johnny Cash biopic WALK THE LINE (2005) starring Joaquin Phoenix, where we see some stylistic parallels, but the one real disappointment with this movie is the conventional, straightforward manner in which it is told, where it resembles a linear progression of Dylan writing his own music, getting discovered, recording his first album, finding an interesting girlfriend, discovering his new electric sound, clashing with the establishment, so there are no real surprises, though it does take some manufactured artistic liberties, continuing a long line of mythical Hollywood fictionalizations.  While Dylan is an artist in development who remains closely guarded and seemingly impenetrable with a strangely magnetic persona, where his internal world is an open question, hiding behind a self-mythologizing mask of fictionalized construction, which may be frustrating to some, yet even today the man behind the curtain remains an indecipherable mystery that was never meant to be unraveled, so we learn very little about a man this film is ostensibly about.  In Scorsese’s ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW (2019), Dylan is famous for re-iterating a George Bernard Shaw quote, “Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.”  Anyone familiar with his early years can recognize that this movie doesn’t have that sneering intellectual arrogance and disdain that was so prevalent in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back (1967), instead there are early signs of what to expect, including that everpresent motorcycle, which is a character in itself foreshadowing what’s to come (50 years later, Dylan's motorcycle crash remains mysterious).    

In the opening sequence, Dylan (Chalamet) arrives in New York City in search of his boyhood idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNary), who was suffering from Huntington’s Disease, an incurable neurodegenerative disease, unable to control his muscles or speech, visiting him at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where he actually sang a song written specifically for him, A Complete Unknown | "Song To Woody” by Timothée Chalamet YouTube (2:20), with Woody expressing approval by pounding the bedside with his fist.  Also in the room was Pete Seeger, who immediately befriended the young man, introducing him to the folk music scene where his star rises, as evidenced by his act following Joan Baez, but as she was leaving, she stopped to take a listen, utterly flabbergasted by what she was hearing.  They would eventually become lovers, even going on tour together, though by that time it had largely deteriorated into insults or ignoring one another.  But their first night together is memorable, as she immediately sees through his bullshit, though his ability to write lyrics was simply astonishing, Blowin In The Wind Scene | A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024 ... YouTube (4:50).   Much of the film deals with Dylan’s mystique, acerbic and socially awkward, as he’s an enigma that simply cannot be understood, which is essentially the subject of Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back, and that any attempt to do so forces him into yet another epic transformation into something else, where the closest we can get to him is through his music, privileging the craft of songwriting and musical experimentation in a way that few musical biopics ever do.  With wall-to-wall music, this film loads up on scenes of musical performances taking place in bedrooms, hotel rooms, small venues, festivals, and recording sessions, where the effect he had on his generation is staggering, yet mostly he wanted no part of it, losing himself in the process of continually discovering new innovations, not robotically repeating the same songs over and over again, which is what the public wanted, and the blueprint for how stars achieve commercial success.  This conflict is the core of the movie. whether it’s relationships or musical choices, as Dylan felt trapped by his fame, and simply refused to be pigeonholed into what others expected him to be.  He was not interested in being the white knight of his generation, a balladeer who conveniently sang songs for every occasion, spurring social change through the eloquent and often prophetic construction of his lyrics, reflected in the ominous lyric, “He not busy being born is busy dying” from It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) YouTube (7:28).  This film concentrates on a few short early years and ignores the rest, as by the time the film ends he has broken free of all expectations and finally discovered he is on his own, able to sing what he wants with whoever he enjoys playing with, but it came as a shock, like a rupture in an existing reality, which is exactly how he was perceived when he brought electric guitars to the conventionally acoustic Newport Folk Festival in 1965, backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band, instructing them to “play it loud,” described in the book as “the night that split the 60’s.”  “I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them,” sang Dylan on Maggie’s Farm, Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm (Live At Newport Folk Festival ... YouTube (4:59), bringing the house down in a chaotic chorus of boos and catcalls and objects thrown onstage, where even a fight breaks out in this version, exposing the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking new music, where it’s easy to forget that Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had previously played electric sets at Newport that very same weekend, so it was essentially a battle of one nonconformist group against another, a dispute about what it meant to rebel against convention, heralding the death of a leftist movement rooted in progressive folk ideals.  According to Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan triggered “the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation,” ending the set with “Strike another match, go start anew” from a final acoustic song, Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Live at the Newport ... YouTube (4:35), but the experience jettisoned him into the future on his own terms, announcing his arrival as a complex, uncompromising artist.            

Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties  Elijah Wald book excerpt from Pitchfork