Dylan in darkest America

Fate also meets up with an old friend, a bartender, mechanic, guitar tech, you-name-it known as Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson). Cupid is a version of Fate's younger self -- Wilson plays him, wonderfully, wearing the same pencil-slim curved mustache and even mimicking the phrasing of Dylan's everyday speech. Principled, upstanding, resolutely uncorruptible -- Cupid isn't a purer version of Fate, just a less weary one. His enthusiasm is youthfully fresh, but it's well grounded, too.

Does Cupid represent the old days and the old ways? Is he a reflection of a simpler time -- the '60s, which, somehow, we have come to think of as "simpler" -- when people had ideals and stuck to them? Maybe.

But I don't think "Masked & Anonymous" is so much about the death of idealism as about accepting its limits. For one thing, the songs included in the movie -- nearly all of them Dylan songs, of course, although not all of them are sung by Dylan -- sound bitingly fresh. That's one of Dylan's trademarks, and it will be one of his greatest and most lasting legacies: Every Dylan fan knows that he never sings a song the same way twice. His phrasing rivals that of even the most innovative jazz singer for sheer variety and spontaneity. Sometimes he twists his songs into mysterious phantom shapes. (As Uncle Sweetheart says of Fate, "All of his songs are recognized, even when they're not recognizable.")

"Masked & Anonymous" explores the Dylan legacy in some obvious ways, and in some not so obvious ones. The movie's soundtrack includes an extraordinary reading of "My Back Pages" in Japanese (performed by the Magokoro Brothers) and the equally astonishing "Come Una Pietra Scalciata" (that's "Like a Rolling Stone," rapped in Italian by Articolo 31). And the movie's killer moment comes when a little black girl (played by Tinashe Kachingwe, and she's marvelous), whose mother has taught her every Jack Fate song in existence, steps out to sing an a cappella "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

The obvious point is that Dylan's influence is a web that has been cast over the whole world. But the less obvious one is that even when Dylan sings one of his own songs, he sings it as a cover. It's never just a "version," but a reinvention -- he comes at it from the outside and works his way in, instead of the other way around. In "Masked & Anonymous," Dylan as Fate sings his own songs with his own band (a youthful and vigorous outfit consisting of Larry Campbell, Tony Garnier, George Racile and Charlie Sexton).

But the Dylan songs done by other people and the Dylan songs done by Dylan-as-Fate aren't copies and originals, respectively. They're a type of call-and-response -- a way of magnifying and expanding the material, whether the person singing is the guy who actually wrote the song or an enthusiastic bunch of Japanese musicians. When Dylan performs "Blowin' in the Wind" -- a song I always think I've heard far too many times, until I hear Dylan singing it, again -- he sings as if he's presenting us with something completely new, a little something he scribbled on the back of a matchbook on his way to the gig.

Is there a greater gift than that?

"Masked & Anonymous" is, inadvertently, about how much Dylan has given us. It is also, again inadvertently, about what we've taken away from him. The whole movie is one giant in-joke about Dylan's career and his destiny -- about the person he has become and is becoming, a person who grows increasingly mysterious to us, instead of more comprehensible.

The movie also asks some tougher questions: What happens when you're strangled by your own revolution, and tangled up in your own myth? At the end of "Masked & Anonymous," Dylan walks away from it all, intact, but there's a catch: He walks away in handcuffs, and we watch him go, his image getting smaller and smaller as he drifts away from us. Dylan in handcuffs, Dylan not being "free," Dylan being beaten down by the Man -- those are images right out of a horror show as it might have been conceived by the '60s counterculture, a nightmare vision of the future worse than anything George Orwell (or even just Aldous Huxley) could have imagined.

Handcuffs represent the worst kind of restraint, but are they more constricting than the slipknot of your own legend? Not by a long shot. Dylan-the-icon doesn't need freedom, because we long ago decided that Dylan-the-icon is freedom. Handcuffs mean nothing to an icon -- he can slip out of them like a comic-book superhero. Dylan-the-icon is Plastic Man or Reed Richards, the stuff little kids think about, and pretend to be, in order to conquer their own fears. Grownups cling harder, and more tenaciously, to their superheroes than children do.

That's why I like the image of Dylan walking away in handcuffs. This is not just an aging Dylan, a Dylan with a few little wrinkles, whom we can still claim as "young," just as we like to think of ourselves as young. This is a Dylan who is almost -- almost -- an old man. And he walks with a country gent's gait, as if he's more accepting of that than we are.

The key to that final image, and maybe the key to all of "Masked & Anonymous," lies in a song by Tammy Wynette, who sang from another quadrant of the 1960s -- a place of picket fences and clapboard houses, a place that seemed far away from the wild plains that Dylan roamed. But in Wynette's corner of '60s America, just as in Dylan's, safety was never guaranteed. Idealism is essential to the spirit of any country, at any time. But idealism isn't a guarantee of safety; it doesn't make you invincible. If anything, it turns you into a walking target. Idealism is more dangerous than plutonium.

In those handcuffs, Jack Fate is facing up to the reality of idealism in a way that hundreds of millions of Bob Dylan fans can't. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Why shouldn't it be Dylan, playing a fictional character that is, in so many ways, himself? In loving Dylan as much as we do -- because the question always boils down to how we could not love him -- we have rewarded ourselves with the luxury of sitting back and doing all the fancy interpreting and analyzing, while we leave the heavy lifting to him. For God so loved the world that he put his own son in handcuffs, so to speak.

And, as Tammy Wynette sang, after all, he's just a man.

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