Jay Kelly

 

Director Noah Baumbach

Baumbach on the set with George Clooney

Clooney with Adam Sandler

Crudup, Dern, Baumbach, and Sandler

The boys, Baumbach, Sandler, and Clooney

JAY KELLY              C+                                                                                                               USA  Great Britain  Italy  (132 mi)  2025  d: Noah Baumbach   

All my memories are movies.                                                                                                           —Jay Kelly (George Clooney)

A somewhat disjointed, emotionally disconnected attempt to do a Felliniesque 8 ½ (1963) existential reassessment of one’s life and career, elevating 60-ish actor George Clooney to the Marcello Mastroianni role, where a whirlwind of behind-the-scenes showbiz personalities are suddenly thrust centerstage, and the surrounding chaos of celebrity entourages suddenly become the focus of the film.  Written with Clooney in mind by Baumbach and British actress Emily Mortimer, both also making brief screen appearances, where only a real movie star would get the underlying nuances of this role, re-examining familiar Baumbach themes of family, separation, resentment, and personal reckoning, the question remains whether anything of real value arises from this trail of missed opportunities and perplexing existential confusion in this overlong film, lacking the subversive edge of his earlier work.  Is George Clooney working with Noah Baumbach a match made in heaven?  Jettisoning a movie career from his success as a handsome leading man in television, Clooney’s best work remains Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998), which features early performances in the budding careers of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, not yet stars, yet both sizzling onscreen, followed by David O. Russell’s THREE KINGS (1999), the Coen Brother’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), BURN AFTER READING (2008), and Hail, Caesar! (2016), Soderbergh’s OCEANS ELEVEN (2001), Stephen Gaghan’s SYRIANA (2005), Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007), Jason Reitman’s UP IN THE AIR (2009), Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), Clooney’s own GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (2005), The Ides of March (2011), and The Monuments Men (2014), Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity – 3D (2013), and Jodie Foster’s Money Monster (2016), where there are ups and downs, but he remains one of the familiar faces of Hollywood.  As for Baumbach, these are not exactly the snarky intelligent kids or anxiety-ridden young adults that comprise so much of his early work in Kicking and Screaming (1995), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007), Greenberg (2010), Frances Ha (2012), While We're Young (2014), The Meyerwitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017), and Marriage Story (2019).  What this film brings is plenty of Hollywood money from Netflix, feeling excessive and over-bloated, yet that’s the point, featuring an A-list cast that is to die for, and while essentially cut from the same cloth, this breezy effort doesn’t hold a candle to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) (1957), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), or Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories  (1980), lacking the brutal autobiographical honesty those films bring.  Strangely opening with a quote from Sylvia Plath, a highbrow American poet whose career abruptly ended all too soon, it eloquently provides the framework for the film, “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself.  It’s much easier to be someone else or nobody at all.”  The lush orchestration by Nicholas Britell is cheesy and overly melodramatic, literally pounding us over the head, though the piano score is more in balance with the brief moments of introspection, while the 35mm cinematography by Linus Sandgren, who has worked before with Damien Chazelle and David O. Russell, is always complimentary, yet this is a vacuous film with no lingering aftereffects, where what’s missing are the meticulously crafted human emotions in Baumbach’s other films, nominated three times for a Best Screenplay Oscar, feeling more like escapist, big budget entertainment, which is unlike anything else in his career of smaller yet boldly personal filmmaking.

What this film lacks, however, is Fellini’s visionary artistry, dark and surreal, creating a psychic kaleidoscope in which Mastroianni’s virtues and peccadilloes, fears and hopes, are quite literally paraded before our eyes, creating a character so dangerously complex that his image forever became emblematic of Fellini himself.  That doesn’t happen here, as no one associates George Clooney as a mirror image of Baumbach, instead Clooney plays himself and his own stardom in what may well be a career-defining performance, where the dreamlike flashbacks and other intrusions into his midlife crisis feel mildly entertaining, but hardly revelatory, seemingly overly shallow, with too many underdeveloped subplots.  In fact, this could be a candidate for the most insipid and least authentic film in Baumbach’s career, the most mainstream and conventionally old-fashioned, a thoroughly polished product and a hollow crowdpleaser, where it’s hard not to think this film is drastically out of step with the times by dealing with the problems of the super privileged.  While it’s not a disaster in the making, it just feels so frivolous and excessive, like the ravings of an overly selfish man, continually placing his career over family, irrespective of the emotional harm, and while he has second thoughts later in his life, his attempts at reconciliation come up short, as the damage has already been done, where his children really don’t want to be around him anymore, sickened by the emotional negligence he has inflicted into their lives, like a black hole.  It’s hard to feel sympathy for this man, yet he’s emblematic of the kind of powerful men now running the government, elitist billionaires placing career over family, or even the interests of the nation, where it’s all about money and power.  While this raises no real questions about the repercussions of politics or capitalism in our lives, it does expose the empty vacuum left as the price of success, where there’s obviously a trade-off, becoming fabulously wealthy as opposed to happy.  These aren’t the kinds of questions asked by ordinary citizens, where it’s hard to feel sympathy for the privileged super rich, as they have all the advantages.  While there is a chic and sophisticated cool in the way this is presented, it breaks no new ground, with Clooney as famous actor Jay Kelly basically doing a riff on himself and his own publicly acclaimed persona, looking back with regret on certain events that shaped him and his career, examining his personal life and some of the choices he’s made, essentially re-examining the legacy he is leaving behind.  At one point he looks at himself in the mirror and compares himself with movie greats from the past, a very self-aware moment, yet he’s also completely oblivious to the emotional wreckage he leaves in his wake, though he couldn’t have done it without Adam Sandler as his agent Ron Sukenick coming along for the ride, a sidekick who’s always there for him through thick and thin, dropping everything at a moment’s notice, continually assisting him any way he can while sacrificing his own family’s well-being, and in the process places his own personal life in constant turmoil, often turning this into a darkly comical buddy movie, yet the question remains whether this is a vanity project or whether this actually holds any lasting artistic value.  You might think it would matter that so many in the cast are celebrity offspring (Clooney, Laura Dern, Riley Keough, and Stacy Keach) or married to fellow artists (Mortimer, Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, and Patrick Wilson), gaining personal insight through their own life experiences, and while it may help with the minute personal details of their roles, this is no romanticized ode to Hollywood, more of a cautionary tale about what we sacrifice for success.

There are self-reflective similarities between this film and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi) (2025), both exploring the dysfunctional relationship between a man and his two adult daughters, who he mostly ignored to focus on his career, while also exploring the delicate balance between art and identity, but Trier handles the familial relationships with so much more complexity and depth, showcasing a poetic eloquence with richly-layered filmmaking.  Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, this is a movie built around the making of movies, as we see the daily anxieties and the juggled priorities, though it opens with a dizzyingly immersive film set, as the camera glides around in a long, single take with overlapping dialogue, reminiscent of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), catching all the various personalities in shadowed silhouettes, producers, managers, camera operators and assistants, yet at the center of this orchestrated chaos is Jay Kelly (Clooney) lying on the ground with a gunshot wound, offering a near-death monologue that wraps up the film before asking the director whether he can go again, thinking he can add more to the scene, essentially opening the door for viewers to enter this highly exclusive world, with a myriad of voices heard offscreen.  “What do you say to people who say you only play yourself?”  It’s a question asked not only of actor Jay Kelly, but of Clooney himself, who’s been playing some version of himself since the beginning, incredibly handsome, suave and debonair, with a witty rapport, like a reincarnation of Cary Grant, one of only four men to have been voted “the sexiest man alive” twice by People magazine, the others being Richard Gere, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp.  Sandler showed a different side of himself in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002), turning compulsively out of control with a gambling addiction in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019), while here he straddles the line between having his own life and disappearing in the Jay Kelly universe, and is on the phone for nearly the entire film, usually talking to his wife Lois (Greta Gerwig) about the latest family emergency, where he’s emotionally exhausted, torn between two worlds, trying to hold his family together from afar.  But he’s a trusted male companion for Kelly, omnipresent, going wherever the actor goes, as does Laura Dern as his publicity agent Liz, following him around along with an everpresent bodyguard Silvano (Giovanni Zeqireya), hair and make-up artist Candy (Emily Mortimer), and even an intern.  While the man likes to complain that he’s always alone, someone is always by his side, where his every whim is catered to, but they’re simply invisible to him, as he takes them for granted.  “We’re not to him what he is to us,” Liz tells Ron.  Putting himself on a pedestal is the first order of business, where perhaps most especially his family become secondary figures in the life he’s chosen, like a solar planet with the moons and stars orbiting around him, where tuning them out seems necessary, at least to him, to maintain his own professional equilibrium, as he needs to be hyper-fixated on each successive role.  Despite this, he can be standoffish and emotionally inaccessible, keeping viewers, fans, family and friends at arm’s length, lacking the exploratory, character-driven nature of Baumbach’s previous films.  Maybe this reveals more about the destructive power of the industry itself than having anything to do with the actual world around us.  In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s showbiz movie ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), Bette Davis gives an infamous monologue while contemplating her own stardom, “The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster.  You forget you’ll need them again.” 

Much like Richard Linklater, Baumbach has built a career accentuating the complex interactions between characters, where his emotional authenticity established him as an important voice of independent cinema, yet there’s much less of that here, sacrificing the usual finesse, as characters routinely appear and disappear within the scenes, with few sticking around, outside of Ron, making it much more difficult to assess, as this never really delves deep enough to challenge the viewers.  Supposedly the most reflective performance in Clooney’s career, “the last of the classic movie stars,” he’s an actor facing his mortality while contemplating his personal and professional choices, feeling more like a road movie, told in a non-linear fashion, with extensive use of flashbacks, moving between his real self and his movie star façade.  Perhaps the most powerful scene in the entire film is a mix of the past and the present, meeting up with an old friend from his young actor studio days, as he runs into Billy Crudup as Timothy, sharing a drink in the present, rehashing old times, recalling that Timothy was the most talented actor in the class, someone who could make anything interesting, and to prove it, he has him read the menu, which turns out to be flabbergastingly good, taking us all by surprise, making so much out of so little.  For a few minutes of screen time, it’s simply phenomenal.  But their respective careers took off in opposite directions following a single audition, with a younger Timothy (Louis Partridge) nervously reading for the part, with a younger Kelly (Charlie Rowe) feeding him the lines, until the director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent, modeled on Peter Bogdanovich, who mentored Baumbach) decides to switch the roles and have Kelly audition for the part.  The scene plays out with Clooney in the present mode off to the side of the frame looking on at their younger selves, like stepping into a memory, a technique that was used by Robert Altman in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), a pivotal moment in their lives where he essentially stole the role from Timothy, who continues to hold a grudge to this day, angrily giving Kelly a black eye before the scene is over, happening offscreen, requiring the expertise of a make-up artist to smooth over the rough edges for his public image.  The real bone of contention is between his two kids, two daughters, Jessica (Riley Keough) and Daisy (Grace Edwards), with the completely estranged Jessica trying to pull him into her therapy session, amenable at first, but he quickly exits when he realizes it’s all about the mistakes he’s made, getting a little bit too real, while Daisy is traveling through Europe with friends before heading off to college in the fall, surprising her unannounced on the train one day, which is an unwelcome visit when she realizes he’s been stalking her through her credit card transactions, wanting nothing more to do with him.  Yet these are the two people whose approval he most wants in his life now that his career is slowing down, suddenly finding himself with time on his hands.  While he’s essentially en route to pick up a lifetime achievement award in Tuscany, watching tribute clips of his own films, which turn out to be Clooney’s movies in his own CINEMA PARADISO (1998) moment, continually thinking about his life along the way, his world splits apart at the seams, seemingly losing everyone he holds dear, where his view of himself comes under scrutiny, regretting he wasn’t there more for his children, where the wondrous flashbacks of the two giggling girls doing amateur outdoor theater as Kelly and Kelly in the back yard are simply adorable, but it’s a reminder of what he’s left behind, adding a tragic humanistic element to the price of fame.     

Don't Look Back

 

Marianne Faithfull in the corner

manager Albert Grossman

Donovan

Director D. A. Pennebaker

Pennebaker with Dylan

Pennebaker holding the camera

Dylan with Howard Alk on the left

Dylan with Alk

DON’T LOOK BACK           A                                                                                               USA  (96 mi)  1967  d: D.A. Pennebaker

I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you...

—Bob Dylan - All I Really Want To Do (Live in Liverpool - 1965 ... outtake footage filmed by Pennebaker, YouTube (3:40)

Made during Dylan’s 1965 solo tour of England, but released in 1967, this is the definitive portrait of the artist at an early stage of his career, a time when he was still only 23, yet it’s the height of his worldwide success, where the film has become an iconic rock document, an anthem for 60’s youth culture.  Pennebaker and Chicago filmmaker Howard Alk, one of the cinematographers on the film who would later direct The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), had unprecedented access, and a brief temporal window behind the scenes that allows viewers to just hang out with the artist for a while as he’s on the verge of becoming internationally famous, with Dylan captured onscreen as he never would be again, offering a rare emotional intimacy that no subsequent documentary has achieved.  This is a film about the 60’s as seen through the dizzying life of one of the standard-bearers of that tumultuous decade, where he is to the 60’s what Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were to the 50’s.  His Ginsberg-like stream-of-conscious words are an aggressive assault to the senses, where the meaning remains highly ambiguous, while his style is constantly changing, and his notorious avoidance of publicity borders on the obsessive, yet he remains the influential voice of the era.  One sequence that stands out, as if pulled out of time from a different era, is Ed Emshwiller footage of Dylan singing outdoors to farmhands two years earlier during a voter registration drive in the cotton fields of Greenwood, Mississippi, Dont Look Back (1967) -- (Movie Clip) Only A Pawn In Their ... YouTube (3:20), where he transitions from a younger version of himself to a live performance on this tour, mirroring the shift from folk traditions to a new terrain of rock.  Filmed during a three week concert tour in the spring of 1965, it’s not so much a documentary as it is a window into a private side of one of our more revered artists, a look behind the curtain, where his sneering intellectual arrogance on display and his disdain for others marks his turf as an insufferable egotist, yet there are throngs of admirers waiting to see him perform, where every concert is sold out.  It’s relaxed and informal, with no set format or criteria, perhaps only visualized in the editing room, which happened very quickly in a matter of weeks, displaying a remarkable gift for weaving music into the visuals so that each seemed to become indistinguishable from the other, reflective of the volcanic social and political transformations taking place during the 60’s, creating not only a revolutionary cinéma vérité approach to a road tour, but a new form of social commentary, bringing it to the mainstream, offering one of the most intimate glimpses possible of the perpetually elusive Bob Dylan.  An artist receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012 and who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 for his “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” with literary allusions to a wide swath of notable poets and writers from Homer to Shakespeare to William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, but in the early years no one really knew what to make of him, and this gritty exposé of the good, the bad and the ugly reflects that mysterious confusion, containing a wide variety of mixed emotions.  A frustrating, puzzling, illuminating, and fleeting portrait of the artist as a young man, originally shot in black and white on handheld 16mm, with blurred grainy images of fast monochrome film, where cigarette smoke permeates every frame, much of the film takes place in a cramped hotel room at the Savoy in London, where the tight quarters only accentuate an atmosphere of intimacy, wandering around backstage, conducting interviews, meeting with fans, taking limo rides, creating a feeling of actually being there.  There is no narrative, and there are no talking heads, with no attempts to define or explain who he is, so it’s such an individualized, interior, free-associating experience that may play out differently for each individual viewer, offering an unflinching gaze into the darker corners of Dylan’s persona.  According to Pennebaker, “Dylan is an interesting person to watch because he is constantly creating himself, and then standing back and trying to witness it,” while according to Dylan, “What happened, [in the sixties] happened so fast, that people are still trying to figure it out.”  You may be able to recognize Joan Baez, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, former Animals organist Alan Price just after he left the group, that’s him on The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964) + clip comp. 60 ... YouTube (4:32), Dylan’s relentlessly aggressive, über manager Albert Grossman (the film is actually his idea), and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg by sight, where there is nothing to identify them otherwise, as they simply appear onscreen, part of the mosaic of intermingling personalities that comprise this film.   

This remarkable film was added to the National Film Registry in 1998, while in 2021 Rolling Stone magazine listed this as the #1 music documentary of all time, 70 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time, described as an “obvious cultural reference point” and a “permanent blueprint for the public’s image of mid-Sixties rock & roll.”  It bears some resemblance to the weirdly scripted comedy of Richard Lester’s A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964), shot during the height of Beatlemania and coinciding with a world tour, where fans besieged their hotels, stole various items for souvenirs, and chased them around London.  Here wildly enthusiastic fangirls are waving to Dylan outside his hotel, hopelessly trying to get his attention, screaming with delight at any sign of him.  What distinguishes this film from other musical documentaries is that this is not a concert film, as none of the songs play out in full, which is actually the film’s biggest criticism, but it’s not that kind of film, where it’s more about the intangible moments in between the songs, with Dylan interacting with the press, hotel personnel, or other friends and musicians paying him a visit, occasionally breaking out in song.  One thing that stands out is that he is defiantly contrarian, not willingly agreeing with anyone, continually finding an antagonistic point of view, yet what’s fascinating is how he sees himself during this momentous period of his life, regarding it all suspiciously, where we literally watch him reading articles written about him, and then reacts as only Bob Dylan can, as he obviously gets a kick out of seeing himself in the news.  When Dylan reads an article that describes him as “puffing heavily on his cigarette, he smokes eighty a day,” he hilariously responds, “God, I’m glad I’m not me.”  Not just a songwriter and musician, but Dylan is also a poet, who attracted the interest of other poets, including fellow musician/poet Patti Smith, who has talked about the impact both Dylan and the film had on her as a young, struggling artist in New York, as she “related to everything he did, his magnetism and sexual energy.  He was nobody’s patsy,” something she describes as “the hubris of youth,” Patti Smith on Bob Dylan and DONT LOOK BACK YouTube (14:01).  This would be Dylan’s final acoustic tour, coming just after he released Bringing It All Back Home, as he began to move away from the folk movement from which he’d emerged, where the first side is all electric, while the second side is all acoustic, becoming his first album to incorporate electric instrumentation.  When he returned to England in 1966 it was for the electric tour that caused one outraged fan who felt so betrayed he shouted out “Judas,” a legendary moment of instantaneous frustration that pretty much defines his career evolution, as he continually evolves into new musical forms, never repeating any song the same way twice.  Curiously, according to photographer Daniel Kramer, who was sent to photograph him, finding him completely uncooperative, he rarely even plays the guitar except when performing.  The film hasn’t aged a bit, and feels as modern and timeless today as it was when it was released, offering a compelling critique of an intrusive media that can completely misunderstand its subjects through their own bias, yet still print distortions and inaccuracies anyway.  Pennebaker’s restless camerawork is perfectly suited for Dylan’s chameleon-like persona, never really answering any of the interviewers questions, typically turning the questions back around on them, often seen hiding behind his everpresent dark sunglasses that he strangely wears indoors, where you may not like him, but he’s very human, as openly flawed as the rest of us.  The title comes from Satchel Paige, the ageless Negro League baseball pitcher who famously remarked, “Don’t look back.  Someone might be gaining on you,” with Dylan offering his own retort, “He not busy being born is busy dying,” and since he so thoroughly carries the film, the focal point of every single second, he describes the film as Pennebaker by Dylan.  The opening two-and-a-half minutes is an improvisational music video (with some calling it the first) promotion for Dylan’s first Billboard-landing single and electric rock anthem, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues (Official HD Video) YouTube (2:15), with Dylan fumbling through a series of cue cards that he drops to the ground after the words are sung, a shorthand for his momentous lyrics, which sets the tone for what follows, with an unidentified Allen Ginsberg in the background, where he and Kerouac used to refer to themselves as “subterraneans,” the title of a 1958 book by Kerouac, where there is an audio recording of him reading a passage from the book, Jack Kerouac Reads From 'The Subterraneans' (1958) YouTube (3:14).

Dylan’s snarly and petulant attitude, particularly with clueless reporters, may have simply been a defense mechanism against the overexposure in newspapers and magazines, where his music was as overplayed on the radio as the Beatles, because commercial radio loves repetition, elevating him to a Godlike status, which he shied away from, so his automatic impulses shut down those questions while making fun of just how ridiculous the situation was that he found himself in, literally jousting with reporters, viewing them as comic relief, Dont Look Back (1967) -- (Movie Clip) Lies And Rubbish YouTube (3:45), where people were asking him everything imaginable, no matter how personal or inappropriate, and then writing whatever the hell they pleased, often using broad, encompassing labels to describe him.  So there are moments when he’s being spectacularly obnoxious towards others, a real jerk, as if he couldn’t care less about them, using acerbic sarcasm as a weapon, yet he also has some indescribable endearing quality, where he seems genuinely authentic and quite comfortable just being himself.  Mixed altogether in a musical collage, we’re privy to a constantly changing mindset that offers an exemplary view of all the contradictions he was constantly dealing with, where it’s impressive that a document like this even exists, as we rarely get behind the façade of great artists, but this one really expresses all the adrenaline-laced, sped-up confusion wrapped up in the meticulously documented, jagged edges of the experience, with Dylan acutely aware that a camera is always on him, where every moment is a performance, yet this may also be who he really is, making things up as he goes along, like looking in a mirror at yourself while real life is happening, where you have to wonder at times if that guy you’re looking at is even you.  In a bewildering moment that comes out of nowhere, all hell breaks loose when Dylan throws an angry tantrum after learning someone threw a glass bottle out the window, causing all sorts of pandemonium mixed with an air of late night drunken revelry, Bob Dylan hotel argument about throwing glass in the street YouTube (2:59).  Lost among the barrage of Dylan clips is an extremely raw and revealing moment with Alan Price, coming at a particularly vulnerable time for an extremely talented artist, having left The Animals under questionable circumstances, where alcohol may have played a role, and while he’s barely onscreen except for a few moments, they are tinged with giddiness turning to heartbreak, where the instantly changing mood becomes something of a subplot for the film.  Dylan’s unidentified right hand man and friendly soulmate is his road manager Bob Neuwirth, a partner in crime with a long and influential association with Dylan, who is with him throughout this film, often acting as a sounding board, both cracking up over the enthusiastic press coverage of Donovan, described by the press as “England’s answer to Bob Dylan,” which becomes a running joke in the film, where his press clippings adorn the hotel mirrors and a concert poster appears in the hotel room draped across a couch, but they’re generally on the same wavelength, Bob Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth YouTube (47 seconds).  Joan Baez makes an early appearance and then disappears, something she has described as “the most demoralizing experience of my life,” apparently having enough of this self-obsessed Dylan guy, but she sings a beautiful song, Dont Look Back (1967) -- (Movie Clip) Percy's Song, Etc. YouTube (3:57), while Dylan completely ignores her, back turned, typing away on his reportedly amphetamine-fueled experimental novel Tarantula, released several years later, which baffled his critics and left his fans scratching their heads, while in this same sequence Marianne Faithfull can be seen tucked away in a corner, never saying a word.  Donovan actually appears in the hotel room and sings a nice, conventional folk song, Donovan - To Sing for You, Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now Baby ... YouTube (4:05), with Dylan watching nervously until Donovan asks if he’d give an impromptu performance of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, which is endearing and seems especially personalized, yet the coup de grâce may actually be an unused outtake from one of Dylan’s most sublimely gorgeous love songs, filled with symbolist wordplay, Bob Dylan - Love Minus Zero/No Limit (Live at Savoy Hotel 1965) [HD FOOTAGE] YouTube (3:42), a snippet of which played in concert closes the film.  It’s fair to say Donovan was one-upped here, and was likely overwhelmed by Dylan in a take no prisoners mode, where there was simply no one else like him in the entire universe.  Not an easy man to get along with, yet this film graces the screen with rare moments of down time, when he had time to kill, preparing for the actual moments when he would take the stage, as this entire film is a lead-in to that combustible moment when Dylan set the world on fire.