One approaches any film about Bob Dylan with trepidation. Can any film adequately capture the scope of one of the most influential yet seemingly unknowable musicians of the last century? With many strikes already against it, director James Mangold and actor Timothée Chalamet manage to hit it out of the park.
The opening song becomes the closing song (Dylan did not even write it), but I won’t spoil that delight any further. Chalamet does the ostensibly impossible, embodying the Bard of Minnesota. The actor’s intonations, inflections and mannerisms seem uncannily accurate.
The film’s production values are completely believable, dropping us onto the Greenwich Village streets of New York (actually Jersey City). We see lower Manhattan for the first time through Dylan’s eyes, fresh from Hibbing in 1961.
The successful means by which the storyline compresses several crucial years is remarkable. Based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! most viewers will know what’s coming (even if they don’t know the title of the book), but still it is a magnificent ride that we take by Dylan’s side. The ride is often via motorcycle, the importance of which is left to another film. Solid kudos to screenwriters Mangold, Wood and Jay Cocks for allowing the music to tell most of the story (too many biopics short-circuit the music in favor of exposition to move the story along).
Dylan clearly is mercurial as he confronts his growing popularity, outwardly rejecting it but internally craving it. His relationship with Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvia Russo at Dylan’s request) is the romantic core of the story, but his relationship with Pete Seeger and by extension Woody Guthrie is the artistic core of the story. Edward Norton is thoroughly believable as the folky patron saint. Seeger is Dylan’s crucial entrée to the burgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village. Seeger’s early vote of confidence smoothes the path for Dylan attaining representation by Albert Grossman and a major record label deal with Columbia. Very quickly Dylan confronts the attendant pressures to maintain his original artistic purity. Yet Dylan’s restless artistic spirit pushes him past the constraining boundaries of folk, finally strapping on a Fender guitar, plugging in and arguably changing the music scene forever.
Nitpickers can find a couple dozen historical errors, but I quickly forgave those matters in light of the larger masterpiece being painted.
This is a remarkable film, deftly revealing the artistic temperament related to creativity and the cost it takes from the individuals involved.
The already converted will be sad when the two hour 21 minute running time flies by and those just now coming to Dylan’s story will be thirsty about learning more.
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