![]() ![]() When Simon scratched his newly purchased disc of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” he rode the bus for another hour to get another copy. It overflows with stunning archival footage, letting us take a deep dive into what it was like to be Paul Simon, a short chipmunk-cute Jewish kid from Queens (born in 1941) who met Art Garfunkel in school, when the two of them were 10, and they started fusing their voices and imitating the doo-wop and rockabilly records they had to ride on the bus for an hour to buy at a record store in Jamaica, Queens. It would work nicely in that form, because the movie, in its leisurely nostalgic epic way, is completely addictive. How should “In Restless Dreams” be consumed? It works as a grand theatrical experience (I saw it in IMAX, where the 1981 Simon and Garfunkel Concert in Central Park looms up like a real concert), but practically speaking I would say: A streamer like Apple should pick up the film and possibly present it in three parts, as a kind of mini-series. Woven throughout “In Restless Dreams” are passages shot in Simon’s small bucolic recording studio in a shack just outside his Texas country home, where we see him talk about his past, work on the recording of his 15th solo album, “Seven Psalms” (which was released four months ago), say things like “Guitarists spend half their life tuning their guitar and the other half playing out of tune,” and collaborate with his good friend Wynton Marsalis. “In Restless Dreams,” by contrast, sprawls profusely over Paul Simon’s music and career, essentially dividing itself into two sections, which Gibney labels “verses.” You could call the sections “Simon and Garfunkel” (the first hour), “Simon in the ’70s” (when he launched his extraordinary solo career and engaged in a kind of ongoing interface with “Saturday Night Live”), and “‘Graceland’ and beyond” (the movie devotes a lot of time to “Graceland” - maybe a bit too much). That film is four hours long, but it was made for HBO and designed to be shown in two parts, so the length was never an issue. And Gibney’s 2015 film “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All” is one of the most sublime music documentaries I’ve ever seen. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown,” it’s sensational. On occasion, he sprinkles in a music doc, which is clearly a labor of love for him. Gibney, of course, is one of the renaissance masters of contemporary documentary, a filmmaker of staggering skill and eclecticism (he has made powerful films about Scientology, the opioids crisis, Julian Assange, Enron, American torture policy, and Hunter S. I raise the issue only because “In Restless Dreams” has come into the Toronto Film Festival without a distributor, and let’s just be honest: The 209-minute running time, when you hear about it, doesn’t exactly sound…user-friendly. ![]() Normally I wouldn’t lead with that daunting fact, especially since the film is mostly marvelous: a documentary that every Paul Simon fan on earth should want to see and experience. The first thing to say about Alex Gibney’s “ In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” is that it’s three-and-a-half hours long.
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