The Many Faces of Bob Dylan

How do you capture quicksilver in a jar? That’s the challenge filmmakers face when attempting to portray Bob Dylan, rock’s most notorious shapeshifter, on the silver screen. It’s a task so daunting that for decades, Hollywood seemed to collectively decide it was better to let sleeping Zimmermans lie.

The most audacious attempt remains Todd Haynes’ 2007 I’m Not There, which took the perfectly logical approach of having six different actors play Dylan, including Cate Blanchett in what might be the most convincing Dylan portrayal ever committed to celluloid. Blanchett captures the razor-sharp wit and mercury-quick temperament of mid-60s Dylan with such precision that you almost forget you’re watching a woman playing a man – which is exactly the kind of gender-bending metacommentary that Dylan himself might appreciate.

The film’s approach – using multiple actors including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere – isn’t just artistic flourish. It’s perhaps the only honest way to capture a man who has spent his entire career dodging definitions like a philosophical Muhammad Ali. When you’re dealing with someone who transformed from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan to Jack Frost and back again, maybe the only way to tell the truth is to embrace the contradictions.

Fast forward to 2024, and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown finally attempts what no filmmaker has dared before: a traditional biopic with a single actor playing Dylan throughout. Timothée Chalamet steps into those impossibly large boots, bringing his considerable charm to bear on young Bobby’s transformation from Hibbing, Minnesota, folkie to Greenwich Village prophet. While Chalamet nails the mumble and the nervous energy, there’s something almost too pretty about the whole affair – like watching Dylan’s story through an Instagram filter. The film feels like what might happen if you asked ChatGPT to write a Dylan biopic: technically accurate but missing that essential wildness that made Dylan, well, Dylan.

 

 

The contrast between these approaches – Haynes’ kaleidoscopic vision versus Mangold’s more traditional narrative – highlights the fundamental challenge of depicting Dylan on screen. Do you embrace the chaos or try to impose order? Do you acknowledge the contradictions or attempt to smooth them away? It’s worth noting that Dylan himself appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, playing a character named “Alias” – because of course he did. Even when playing someone else, Dylan couldn’t help but comment on the nature of identity itself.

Between these major attempts, the Dylan legend has flickered through cinema like a ghost, appearing in brief cameos and passing references. Benjamin Pike’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn as “Young Bob” in Inside Llewyn Davis serves less as a portrayal and more as an omen of the changes about to sweep through the folk scene the film depicts. It’s Dylan as harbinger rather than character, which might be the most honest portrayal of all.

The irony is that the most compelling Dylan on screen might be Dylan himself, particularly in D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue. The latter is especially fascinating because it blends fact and fiction so seamlessly that even Dylan scholars were left scratching their heads about what was real and what wasn’t – which feels exactly right for a documentary on the Bard of 4th Street.

What makes Dylan such a challenging subject for dramatic portrayal isn’t just his chameleonic nature – though that’s certainly part of it. It’s that Dylan himself has spent decades actively resisting the kind of easy categorization that narrative film demands. Try to pin him down as the voice of a generation, and he’ll write a country album. Call him a protest singer, and he’ll go born again. Label him a folk purist, and he’ll plug in at Newport just to spite you.

Perhaps that’s why it took Hollywood so long to attempt a straightforward biopic. How do you write a traditional three-act structure about someone who’s spent their entire career subverting narrative expectations? Even Dylan’s own autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, plays fast and loose with chronology and facts, suggesting that maybe there is no “true” Dylan story to tell.

In the end, maybe the best way to understand Dylan on film is to embrace the impossibility of the task. Each portrayal – from Blanchett’s electric Dylan to Chalamet’s polished version – adds another facet to our understanding of an artist who has always been more comfortable raising questions than providing answers. Like the man himself once sang, “She knows there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all.” In trying (and sometimes failing) to capture Dylan on screen, these films might be telling us more about ourselves and our need to understand the unknowable than about Bob Dylan himself.

-Staci Wilson

Photo: Bob Dylan (Getty)