I was curious and wary of seeing the new movie about Bob Dylan, “A Complete Unknown.” Dylan is still alive and well, presumably, and I thought it would be near impossible for an actor to conjure up Dylan’s look, posture, and inimitable way of singing.

At first, the actor, Timothy Chalamet, looks miscast and self-conscious as Dylan, but this works for him as he steadily begins to take on the facial expressions and posture of the peculiar, driven young man who arrives in New York city in 1961, age 19, determined to make it as a “folk singer.”

Watching it took me back to 1964, when I was sharing a scrappy apartment in Berkeley with three other young women students. One of them, Pris, went to see Joan Baez at the Berkeley Community Theater and came back raving about Joan and the young man whom she’d brought on stage to sing with her, a guy called Bob Dylan.

Pris described how Joan and Bob had leaned their heads toward each other, almost touching, as they sang into twin mikes.

Pris was my favorite friend, since we’d been assigned to share a room in a sorority at Berkeley. She had a great presence, made everyone laugh, and was the person people sought out when they needed to “talk.” Pris spoke in superlatives, like, “The greatest artist in the world!” and “The most charming man I have ever met!” She was voted the “peppiest pledge” in the sorority, and she made me feel loved.

There was no Internet then and we didn’t have computers. (can you remember/imagine?) So the day after seeing Bob Dylan, Pris pulled me to the record store on Telegraph Ave. to buy his album, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan.  In less than a week, we knew the songs by heart.

We stared at the cover, where Dylan is walking toward us, snuggled up with a girl who has hair like most of us did then—long and straight. They’re walking toward the camera in the center of a cobblestone street in Greenwich Village, and we wondered if she was a model or Dylan’s girlfriend and what she was like.

I moved from Berkeley to New York the next year to go to the Columbia School of Journalism, and Pris got married to her friend since childhood, Tony. They moved to London and I rarely saw them again. But I continued buying Dylan’s records—“Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde.” The albums that followed, however, did not move me and I stopped listening much to him after that.

Until 1975, when I was living in Venice, Ca, working on my first book, Loose Change. The guy I was seeing, also named Bobby, brought over Dylan’s latest, “Blood on the Tracks,” and we were taken by the song, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” We listened to it again and again to unravel the story Dylan was singing about: a bank robber called the “Jack of Hearts,” and two women who loved him, Lily and Rosemary, the latter of whom ended up being hanged for murdering the Jack of Hearts with a penknife.

We decided to act out the song, and rented period dresses and authentic cowboy clothing from Western Costume in Hollywood, which had been the primo costume supplier for movies and T.V. since 1913. One of our friends, a photographer, volunteered to take pictures of us in character.

We researched hair styles from the old West, and began scouting to find a place that looked like an old saloon. We learned the song by heart, and excitement was mounting, when suddenly our friend Bobby had a motorcycle accident and had to have surgery, and the energy for us to stage the Jack of Hearts fizzled out.

But I always loved the song.

In the years and decades that followed, Dylan’s singing voice changed, and I was not enamored by his new music. Then, last week, when I watched A Complete Unknown, I was smiling all through it, wondering how much of it was true.

My guy, Rio, refused to watch it because Dylan had been a major influence when he was growing up and he didn’t want to see a Hollywood version. But I must say that I felt delighted watching it, and very shortly, I wasn’t comparing Chalamet’s appearance with Dylan’s, although I did wonder if some of the events portrayed were accurate. I was transported back to that magical period we lived through, and I felt happy.

If Dylan’s music is part of your history and perhaps even if not, I suggest you may enjoy A Complete Unknown.

Let me know, please.