A 21-year-old Queens College student wrote a song in his parents’ bathroom about how we would all be swallowed up by death. “Hello, darkness, my old friend,” he began, singing to the tiles. This was not an obvious chart-topping topic, yet “The Sounds of Silence” eventually became a No. 1 hit, and Paul Simon, with his childhood pal Artie Garfunkel rocking a harmony, broke very, very big. An astonishing trail followed, all of it still crazy after 60 years. The conduit is now the subject of a documentary by Alex Gibney. During In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, we see footage of a young Simon with audio engineer Roy Halee, recording at the bottom of an elevator shaft to get the right drum sound for “The Boxer.” The fighter still remains. “I was around when he was doing the work, it was like Picasso painting,” says Gibney. “Watching him in the present gave me more insight into the past.” —David Yaffe