Bob Dylan

“Old musicians are the new superheroes,” ran the headline of an article published a few months ago by Rivista Studio. As the great comic-book movie binge seems to be winding down, will pop music heroes become Hollywood's new source of blockbusters?

It all began with Bohemian Rhapsody, which relaunched the genre with its haul of four Oscars in 2019; then came Rocketman, Elvis, “Back To Black”… and soon it will be Bruce Springsteen’s turn to hit the big screen in the upcoming “Deliver Me From Nowhere”, starring “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White.

Nostalgia, after all, seems to be one of the few certainties left amid the fragmentation of our present: when the future starts to vanish – as sociologist Grafton Tanner reflects in his latest book, Nostalgoritmo – nostalgia becomes the most reassuring refuge. To guarantee a sold-out stadium, nothing works better than anniversary tours celebrating some milestone from the past; to sell a vinyl or a CD, it's far easier to win people over with the deluxe edition of an album they already know by heart; even on a webzine like OndaRock, when all is said and done, the most-visited pages are still the ones about the notorious rock dinosaurs…

Neuroscience has a term for it: the "reminiscence bump", the tendency to remember more vividly the experiences we lived through in our youth. "It follows that the music we listened to as teenagers and twenty-somethings", writes Stefano Pistolini in the Foglio, "will keep on accompanying us, making our memory sparkle". With a few side effects that aren't exactly minor.

The proliferation of music biopics is exactly one such side effect: in most cases, the nostalgia business gets fans to buy a cinema ticket regardless, without worrying too much about the actual quality of the film. What's more, stepping into the shoes of a musical icon is one of those challenges that, for an actor, can lead straight to the awards that really matter (or, to put it in Tarantino's more caustic terms, "biopics are just a big excuse to get actors an Oscar"...): it happened with Rami Malek's Freddie Mercury, and we'll see whether it happens again with Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan. Because "A Complete Unknown", James Mangold's film about the Duluth songwriter, which has just arrived in Italian cinemas too, makes no secret of its Oscar ambitions (as confirmed, for that matter, by the 8 nominations it has racked up).

The idea of Mangold (already behind the camera for "Walk The Line", the biopic on Johnny Cash released some twenty years ago now) grew out of a book written by Elijah Wald in 2015, "Dylan Goes Electric" (published in Italy as "Il giorno che Bob Dylan prese la chitarra elettrica"), which recounts Dylan's legendary electric turn of the mid-1960s. Martin Scorsese had already turned that story into an (unmissable) documentary back in 2005 with his "No Direction Home". Now it's the turn of fiction – although in this case fiction has the more or less explicit aim of becoming a direct impersonation of reality: to go back to Lorenzo Peroni's article for Rivista Studio that we started from, "in music biopics there's this unhealthy idea that acting has to be tied to an operation of mimesis, even of possession". "A Complete Unknown" is no exception to the rule, with a promotional campaign entirely focused on showing just how indistinguishable Chalamet supposedly is from the real Dylan (even though his talent, in truth, came through more in the unconventional readings of some of the lesser-known corners of Dylan's songbook that he offered on "Saturday Night Live" than in the faithful copies found on the film's soundtrack).

Mr. Zimmerman, for his part, has never much cared for indulging in nostalgia. Suffice it to say that his latest tour was devoted not to the full run-through of one of his past masterpieces, but to his most recent album, "Rough And Rowdy Ways". And anyone lucky enough to see him on stage certainly had no reason to complain about it... But it seems that Dylan gave the screenplay for "A Complete Unknown" not only his approval, but even his direct input: according to what Edward Norton (who plays Pete Seeger in the film) has said, Dylan supposedly set just one condition: that the plot include at least one entirely made-up episode. Which, it has to be said, sounds terribly Dylan-esque... And then Dylan himself, who has recently taken to posting on X in his own words out of nowhere (naturally in his unmistakably elusive style), gave the film an explicit stamp of approval: "There's a movie about me coming out soon, called 'A Complete Unknown' (what a title!). Timothée Chalamet is the star. Timmy's a brilliant actor so I'm sure he's going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me."

Of course, aside from the occasional well-aimed line, the script of "A Complete Unknown" doesn't escape the genre's usual clichés and contrivances, from the obligatory looks of wonder trotted out the moment Dylan/Chalamet starts singing, to the flimsy love triangle staged with Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo (Suze Rotolo, in real life). But the heart of a film like this doesn't lie in the plot (inevitably predictable, and with some rather major misreadings of history too), nor in the somewhat calligraphic imitation of Dylan's iconography. Rather, its appeal lies in making visible the legendary material, the epic of stories handed down through rock mythology: a baby-faced Dylan visiting Woody Guthrie in hospital, the hootenanny nights in Greenwich Village clubs, even the received wisdom about Pete Seeger's fury at the 1965 Newport festival...

In short, if for Hollywood singers are the new Avengers, Dylan is without a doubt its Captain America. So, setting aside the documentaries here (from the classic "Don't Look Back" of 1967 to the more recent "Rolling Thunder Revue: Martin Scorsese racconta Bob Dylan" from 2019) and focusing precisely on fiction, let's try to dive into his own personal cinematic universe, revisiting five key films that have brought Dylan to the big screen in the past, either as subject or as author. In the hope that "A Complete Unknown" ultimately works more as an introduction for newcomers than as flattery for the nostalgic.

(Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

Contrary to what's usually believed, Sam Peckinpah wasn't actually the first to cast Dylan as an actor: back in 1962, English director Philip Saville had already decided to put him in a film. He'd come across that kid from Minnesota on stage at a Greenwich Village club, and a few months later brought him to London to shoot a BBC play titled "The Madhouse On Castle Street". The film, in which Dylan played a man-of-few-words anarchist student (and even sang a then-unreleased "Blowin' In The Wind"), aired in January 1963, but there's no way to see it today: in 1968, the film fell victim to the BBC's archive purges (a 2005 documentary, "Dylan In The Madhouse", was devoted to this story). So, to explore the relationship between Dylan and cinema, we have no choice but to start from the classic "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid".

The idea of introducing Dylan to Peckinpah is credited to screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer: apparently, the director of "The Wild Bunch" didn't even know who Dylan was, but was won over the moment he heard him sing. Too bad music and acting aren't exactly the same thing... Dylan was given (besides the soundtrack) the role of an enigmatic member of Billy The Kid's gang named Alias. In 1973, in the midst of a creative crisis that would only end with "Blood On The Tracks", Dylan relocated with his wife for three months to Durango, Mexico, to take part in the shoot: a hellish experience, marked by family arguments and tension with the cast. His role in the film was gradually cut down, given his less-than-stellar acting skills ("There was nobody in that story who was the character I played", he admits). And yet, capitalizing on the sheer familiarity of his image, the figure carved out around him manages to take on an enigmatic, indecipherable aura.

Garrett glances over at Alias while getting a shave from the barber and asks who he is: "That's a good question", Alias replies, in an oblique tone. It would be hard to imagine a more Dylan-esque introduction than that... "Alias is an observer", explains Wurlitzer. "He, more than anyone else in the film, is aware of Billy's legend". Nameless, gunless, rootless: the character of Alias ends up contributing to that sense of fatalism that makes "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid" such a bitter, twilight-toned western.

The scene: Beans

Black hat, black suit, cigar clenched between his teeth: Pat Garrett is waiting for Billy The Kid's companions in the corner of a saloon. When they arrive, he holds them at gunpoint and starts interrogating them with arrogance. "Young fella", he says, turning to Alias. "I want you to go over there, to that shelf of canned goods, and give us a nice reading, out loud, so everyone can hear". Alias puts on his gold-rimmed glasses and begins reading the labels: "Spinach, beans, beef stew...". It's the slightly surreal backdrop to the tense standoff between Garrett and Billy's companions, which resolves itself with the inevitable dose of lead. After the shootout, Alias takes off his glasses with a shrug: "Beets, spinach, prunes...". "Young fella, when you see Billy, tell him we had a drink together".

It's obviously "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" that stands as the signature song of the "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid" soundtrack. But the prize for the most western-sounding track of the bunch goes to "Billy", an outlaw ballad in the vein of "John Wesley Harding" that appears in three different versions across the album (plus a few further takes to be found on the Dylan "50th Anniversary Collection" devoted to 1973). “There’s eyes behind the mirrors in empty places/ Bullet holes and scars between the spaces/ There’s always one more notch and ten more paces/ Billy, and you’re walkin’ all alone”.

(Bob Dylan, 1978)

“Alienation taken to the extreme”: that’s how Dylan describes his most ambitious, disorienting, torrential cinematic project. “The naked alienation of the inner self versus the outer self.” During the picaresque journey of the “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975, Dylan decided to try his hand as creator, director and actor of a “post-existentialist film”, piling up hours and hours of more or less amateurish footage shot alongside his travelling companions. In 1977, Dylan set about editing the film, adopting, as always, a thoroughly personal method: as Allen Ginsberg recounts, Dylan sorted every scene onto index cards divided by theme, matching each card to dominant colors or recurring images. And then he had fun shuffling everything around.

The result is a nearly four-hour film titled “Renaldo And Clara”, presented as something between a tour diary and a work of fiction. On one hand, the film gathers various concert clips and episodes drawn from the wanderings of the “Rolling Thunder Revue”: Dylan and Ginsberg visiting Kerouac’s grave, the meeting with Native American chief Rolling Thunder, the people of Harlem interviewed about the case of Rubin Carter (the boxer wrongly convicted of murder at the center of his “Hurricane”).

On the other hand, Dylan hands his companions the role of actors, having them improvise a series of scenes with a rather thin plot, centered on a sort of brothel run by an elderly gypsy madam and — above all — on the ambiguous love triangle between Dylan/Renaldo, the Woman in White, an effigy of death played by Joan Baez (though sometimes also by Dylan’s wife, Sara), and Clara, who is instead meant to represent freedom and who wears Sara’s face.

Beyond the amateurish acting and the excessive length of the film, what makes it even harder to watch is the fact that it doesn’t follow a chronological narrative, but instead proceeds through symbolic, chromatic and conceptual suggestions. A sort of initiatory journey echoing the teachings of painter Norman Raeben, the great mentor of the mid-Seventies Dylan: “This film creates and contains time,” Dylan states firmly. “We stopped time, we grabbed hold of it.” But apart from die-hard fans, very few people are willing to sit in a cinema for hours trying to crack yet another Dylanesque riddle. And the film turns out to be a spectacular flop.

Evening is made of golden and sapphire reflections along the coast of Rhode Island. The group is gathered in a circle around the table: someone talks about meditation, someone strums a guitar. Dylan wears his feathered hat, absent-mindedly blowing into a trumpet. Allen Ginsberg, dark-bearded and dressed in white, begins to chant a mantra: everyone follows his lead, as he sways, hops, leads a round dance. The light of sunset shimmers on the water, Dylan’s gaze drifts toward the horizon. Trumpet in hand, he heads toward the sea, the rest of the company trailing behind him. A gypsy-like fragment that captures the whole spirit of the “Rolling Thunder Revue”: naivety and friendship, alcohol and music, mysticism and America.

Not me: could there be a better summary of the Dylan of the “Rolling Thunder Revue”? I'm not the one you're looking for, babe. “The mask is more important than the face,” Dylan says about “Renaldo And Clara”. And the close-up that lingers on him shows his face painted white, like the performers of the commedia dell’arte. A mask, precisely. The folk soul of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” — the anti-labels anthem written a decade earlier for “Another Side Of Bob Dylan” — grows more restless than ever, amid the shimmer of Mick Ronson’s guitar and the vitality of Rob Stoner’s bass. “No no no no, it ain’t me babe!” Dylan proclaims with feverish energy. Impossible not to be swept along.

(Richard Marquand, 1987)

Life is hard for old rock stars. Billy Parker has retired from the scene and drives around in a battered pick-up truck, hardly ever leaving his farm in Pennsylvania. Cowboy boots and tousled hair, he no longer wants to hear about the days when he was in the spotlight. Until he runs into Molly, an aspiring singer with the fire of youth in her heart.

As an actor, Dylan hasn't improved much over time. Then again, the film he appears in in 1987, “Hearts Of Fire”, is even worse than his performance as Billy Parker: an utterly predictable love triangle with Fiona Flanagan and Rupert Everett, in which Richard Marquand (director of “Return Of The Jedi”) and Joe Eszterhas (screenwriter of “Flashdance” and later “Basic Instinct”) trot out every tired cliché about the world of rock music. In the original idea behind the screenplay, Billy Parker was supposed to be an outlaw rocker, a sort of romantic bandit, but even this minimal attempt to deviate from the predictability of the plot is dropped in the final version.

“Hearts Of Fire” works well, however, as a metaphor for the mid-Eighties Dylan. With a good dose of self-irony, Bob really feels like Billy: a veteran, a survivor, an outsider (a more or less common fate, in those years, for the great rock icons of the Sixties). Always torn between playing along and stepping away. “I hadn't vanished from the scene, but the road had narrowed, had almost come to an end,” he would confess years later in his autobiography. “The mirror had turned around and I could see the future, an old actor rummaging through the trash bins outside the theater where he'd once triumphed.”

Dylan doesn't even show up at the London premiere of “Hearts Of Fire”. The film will never make it to theaters in the United States, sunk by the reaction of British audiences. It will take a long time before the American songwriter decides to try his hand at the big screen again. In the meantime, his connection to Hollywood (aside from the use of his old catalogue in cult scenes like the one in “The Big Lebowski” set to “The Man In Me”) will mainly rest on original songs written for film soundtracks: “Band Of The Hand”, alongside Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, kicks off the trend in 1986 in support of the film of the same name, “You Belong To Me” accompanies Oliver Stone's “Natural Born Killers”, marking Dylan's Nineties rebirth, but it's with “Things Have Changed” (for Curtis Hanson's “Wonder Boys”) that Dylan wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2001. The mirage of cinema has officially been rekindled.

Molly goes to visit Billy at the farm where he's holed up raising chickens. A lot of chickens. Billy welcomes her with an air of indifference and shows her a fridge full of eggs. A lot of eggs. "Want some eggs?", he asks with a half-mocking smile. And without even giving her time to answer, he shuts the fridge again. It's a perfect example of the surreal little sketches that dot "Hearts Of Fire". Dylan devotee Rebecca Slaman (@ithrewtheglass on X) turned it into a t-shirt that's already become iconic among fans: because these days there's nothing sacrilegious about turning Dylan into a meme - quite the opposite. Followers of the cult, roughly from the millennial generation onward, have shed the pedantry of their predecessors (listen to the Jokermen podcast if you don't believe it…). Irony is a far more Dylan-esque virtue.

In "Hearts Of Fire" - another paradox - it's precisely Dylan's own songs that are conspicuously absent (and "I Had A Dream About, Baby", from "Down In The Flood", certainly doesn't help matters). In the mid-Eighties, the American songwriter found himself at one of the lowest points of his career. So it's no surprise that the film's best performance comes from a cover of a John Hiatt song, "The Usual". Dylan, in a checked shirt with an electric guitar slung over his shoulder, sings it on the stage of a cheap dive bar, spitting out the lyrics with a cutting smile. Within the fiction, it's Billy Parker's big hit. In reality, Dylan's performance manages to redeem the plasticky rock of an arrangement that's all too much a product of its era.

(Larry Charles, 2003)

Sundance Film Festival, 2003. Dylan shows up in an implausible blond wig and a wool cap pulled down over his head: he's the star of a new film, but as usual he mostly enjoys confounding expectations. About twenty years later, Timothée Chalamet will imitate that same look for the New York premiere of "A Complete Unknown"... we were talking about memeification, weren't we?

"Masked And Anonymous", the film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is yet another Dylan-esque cinematic failure. Actually, it's the best of his failures. Unlike "Renaldo And Clara", Dylan doesn't try his hand at directing. Unlike "Hearts Of Fire", he doesn't simply confine himself to acting. But his fingerprints are all over it, and it's not always a happy imprint.

To appear in Dylan's new project, Hollywood's biggest names line up: from John Goodman to Jeff Bridges, from Penélope Cruz to Val Kilmer, from Mickey Rourke to Jessica Lange. The star-studded cast, however, isn't enough. Nor is Larry Charles's direction enough (he would find success a few years later thanks to "Borat" with Sacha Baron Cohen). The weak point is the screenplay, which Charles co-wrote with Dylan himself (under the pseudonym Sergei Petrov).

Dylan, for a change, plays an old, faded rock star, Jack Fate. Who is also the President's son, the leader of a South American-style dictatorial regime that appears to have supplanted American democracy in a (dystopian) near future. The plot revolves around Fate's release from prison so he can take part in a benefit concert, while the President lies on his deathbed. Beyond this bare-bones synopsis, though, the plot actually unfolds in anything but a linear fashion, essentially serving as glue for a series of encounters and exchanges that are invariably cryptic.

In a chaotic scenario of corrupt revolutionaries and secret lovers (which even features a Sorrentino-esque circus complete with lookalikes of John Paul II, Gandhi and Lincoln mixed in with illusionists, wrestlers and ventriloquists), there's plenty of wasted potential: there's a wry hall-of-mirrors game with the Dylan icon (as when the concert organizers demand that Jack Fate's songs be "recognizable"), there are flashes of political satire and existential fatalism that deserved far better development ("Human beings, alone with their secrets, masked and anonymous: nobody really knows them"). In a parallel universe, "Masked And Anonymous" could have been a masterpiece.

Jack Fate climbs in handcuffs into the van that's set to take him back to prison, casting one last glance toward the sky. In the streets, all that's left is poverty, disillusionment and a few tattered scraps of flag. Fate looks straight into the camera with a disenchanted smile on his lips: "Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we need to know which things have no meaning at all", the voiceover intones. Underneath, a gorgeous version of "Blowin' In The Wind" creeps in (recorded live in Santa Cruz in 2000). "I stopped trying to understand a long time ago", Fate concludes. Perhaps that's the only way to reach true understanding.

Unlike "Hearts Of Fire", the songs are the strong suit of "Masked And Anonymous": a handful of superlative performances alongside the "Never Ending Tour" band (in the film's fiction, the Simple Twist Of Fate, Jack Fate's cover band), filmed on the stage of an old theater. The most surprising is the stripped-down, moving reinterpretation of "I'll Remember You" (from the overproduced 1985 album "Empire Burlesque"), which unfortunately doesn't appear on the official soundtrack album. George Receli brushes his snare with brushes on a case of Mexican beer, Charlie Sexton weaves acoustic guitar lines around Tony Garnier's upright bass. And Dylan's voice bends into a tone of rough tenderness.

– 5 –

I'M NOT THERE

(Todd Haynes, 2007)

 

"Poet, prophet, outlaw, con man, electricity star." Even corpse and martyr. To try to capture the multitudes behind the Dylanesque mask, it took an idea like director Todd Haynes's: six different characters, each played by a different actor, called upon to stage as many phases of Dylan's career. Richard Gere and Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw; but also Cate Blanchett and the fourteen-year-old African-American Marcus Carl Franklin. "Dylan has rejected the public projection of who he's supposed to be so many times, and in so many different ways, that the most sensible thing to do is turn him into a group of people": that's how Haynes explains the inspiration behind his "I'm Not There", the film that in 2007 attempted for the first time to stage the biography of the Duluth songwriter.

The title comes straight from one of the most mysterious tracks on the "Basement Tapes", "I'm Not There," a hushed confession about always finding oneself somewhere else. That's exactly the thread running through Haynes's film: if in "Velvet Goldmine," back in 1998, the Californian director had already successfully explored the world of rock, this time his approach becomes more visionary and evocative.

"Haynes has crafted an ironic hagiography, the legenda aurea of a saint whose six lives are recounted, hinting that still more could be told," writes Alessandro Carrera about the film. "Dylan's life has already ceased to be a life and has become a passion play that anyone can perform. Dylan is everyone, and everyone can be Dylan for fifteen minutes. Especially because Dylan, precisely because he's always someone else, can never represent himself."

While the parts that mimic "Don't Look Back" end up feeling a bit too much like parody, it's the sections that take more narrative liberties that best succeed in capturing the many facets of Dylan: from the young Black kid who invents an imaginary biography under the name Woody Guthrie, to the older Billy who tries to flee the world by hiding out in the town of Riddle, these Dylans plucked from some parallel universe reveal more about the real Dylan than the realism of a straightforward narrative ever could.

The scene: Sermon

When the preacher steps up to the microphone, all eyes turn to him. Someone shifts on their folding chair, someone else clutches a crucifix between their fingers. The children play at the back of the congregation hall. "We were all rolled up in the devil's pocket," the preacher begins to proclaim. "I'm not talking about the devil with the pitchfork and horns, I'm talking about a spiritual devil, in the dead of night... and he must be defeated!" He was once a famous singer, but then he chose to follow his calling. And here comes the piano, as the voice rises into a hymn: "I'm pressing on, I'm pressing on." The backing singers carry the song, the congregation begins clapping along: "I'm pressing on, to the higher calling of my Lord!" Dylan and his conversion, explained in a single scene.

The song: Goin' To Acapulco

The soundtrack of "I'm Not There" entrusts the reinterpretation of the Dylan songbook to a genuinely stellar alternative lineup (Sonic Youth, Mark Lanegan, Cat Power, Sufjan Stevens, Stephen Malkums, to name just a few). A pairing that reaches its peak when, in the imaginary town of Riddle, Jim James and Calexico take the stage of a gazebo. The singer's face is painted white beneath a dusty hat, just like the Dylan of the "Rolling Thunder Revue." Beside him, the coffin of a young girl dressed in white, framed with flowers. And to the sound of a brass band, "Goin' To Acapulco" (another hidden treasure from the "Basement Tapes") turns into a heartrending funeral song. Because the mystery of death - as Bob Dylan himself once explained to us - is the great secret kept by folk songs.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Gabriele Benzing, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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