Bob Dylan on Film: A Guide to the Movies’ True Shapeshifter

The concert stage-to-Hollywood highway has been wide and inviting for decades. Everyone from Elvis and the Beatles to Madonna and Taylor Swift has journeyed down that road. But there’s something unique about Bob Dylan’s big-screen presence. He is Dylan the troubadour, Dylan the documentary subject, Dylan the car commercial star, Dylan the lurking stranger with a very sharp knife. Over seven decades, he’s been ubiquitous, but never predictable.

Then again, Dylan has always seemed to be playing a role, including the role of Bob Dylan. (He was born Robert Zimmerman.) He appeared in the world as a folk singer of protest songs, then blew all that up to go electric, a moment that’s so culturally significant that it’s served as the focal point for a whole lot of movies about him.

Watching every one of those films suggests he is at his core a prankster, or maybe more properly a trickster: Whenever he’s become predictable, he changes. The most successful, or at least fascinating, of these movies tends to mess in one way or another with his seemingly carefree relationship to notions of authenticity or identity. The new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet, posits Dylan as the prototypical postmodern artist, appearing in the world at a moment when notions of objective truth and artistic dogma were being blown to smithereens. The world is changeable and confusing; why shouldn’t an artist be?

Dylan, the Rebellious Troubadour

His early career coincides neatly with the rise of direct cinema and observational documentary, facilitated in part by advancements in recording technology. Directors could capture sound and image on the same film, and their equipment was getting lighter and more portable, making it easier to rush down a hallway behind a singer headed to a stage, or sit relatively unobtrusively in the corner of a hotel room or back of a car.

So we end up with a lot of footage of the singer as a young man, much of which would be restored and repurposed in later years. Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary “Festival” wasn’t solely about Dylan; its focus was the counterculture movement as manifested at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1966.

But if you know anything about Dylan lore, you know that he was there for three of those years, and in 1965 he managed to anger attendees and organizers by performing with a band and electric instruments. People hollered and catcalled and threw things at the stage, feeling betrayed. And Lerner got it all on film.

In 1967, D.A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” (that’s not a typo!) was released. The filmmaker followed Dylan through his 1965 concert tour in England, capturing confrontational interviews with journalists; performances with Joan Baez; and Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, sparring with hotel staff and concert organizers. If you’ll pardon the pun, it’s an electric film, with Dylan’s charisma and pique and even a calculated brattiness on full display.

“Dont Look Back” isn’t just a fascinating look at Dylan; it’s also one of the most important films in American history. The Library of Congress has preserved it in the National Film Registry, and critics regularly place it atop lists of the best documentaries of all time. It’s furnished a common cultural touchstone, too: The film starts with Dylan holding a set of cards with words on them, dropping them as we hear his “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It’s widely referenced, including in the video for Weird Al Yankovich’s song “Bob.”

One more film in this youthful era for Dylan: “Eat the Document” (1972), which Pennebaker shot under Dylan’s direction. This one captured parts of Dylan’s 1966 European tour, when he was backed by the band that would later become The Band. (He noodles with Robbie Robertson on some songs.) Dylan edited the movie after he recovered from his 1966 motorcycle accident, but ABC, which had commissioned the film for TV, rejected it as too incomprehensible for an audience. It’s also very hard to see — it was not released on home video and rarely appears in theaters. But some of the footage shows up later, in the first of Martin Scorsese’s films about Dylan.

How to stream:

“Festival”: Search for it on YouTube.
“Dont Look Back”: Stream on Max or the Criterion Channel; buy or rent on various platforms.
“Eat the Document”: Search for it on YouTube.

Dylan, the Movie Star

By the early 1970s, Dylan was getting interested in the movies, and the movies were getting interested in him. Kris Kristofferson, one of the stars of Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 revisionist western, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” brought Dylan onto that project to write the title song. But soon he wound up writing songs for the whole film, including “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and the soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy.

And while the stars include Kristofferson, James Coburn and many others, Dylan gets a role, too. It seems prophetic — or perhaps just insightful — that he plays a mysterious stranger named Alias.

In the mid-1970s, Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour meant a lot of new footage. Scorsese would use it in his own Dylan films some day. But before that, Dylan decided to put in his own film, the sprawling, semifictional “Renaldo and Clara.” It’s very long, and tough to see — it was so critically derided that it left theaters a few weeks after its 1978 release. But it’s an interesting document, reflective of Dylan’s blending of truth and fiction in his own work. There’s concert footage, and there are documentary interviews, but there are also fictional vignettes that reference Dylan’s life and his songs. Dylan (sometimes) appears as a character named Renaldo, and his wife, Sara, as Clara; Joan Baez, Dylan’s longtime collaborator and sometime lover, also appears as a character called the Woman in White.

After this period comes a rather dark one in Dylan’s movie career. It starts with “Hearts of Fire,” a 1987 film by Richard Marquand, director of “Return of the Jedi.” It stars Dylan as a washed-up musician who meets a young singer (played by the rocker Fiona) and brings her on tour, where she meets the singer she’s idolized (played by Rupert Everett). The film is not good, seemingly a riff on “A Star Is Born,” but with its biggest star in a strangely sidelined role. Bummer.

Somehow it’s not the worst movie from this period, though. Dylan made a cameo as a painter in the 1990 drama “Catchfire” (a movie its director, Dennis Hopper, disowned). But the real stinker is “Masked and Anonymous” (2003), directed by Larry Charles and co-written by Charles and Dylan (under the pseudonym Sergei Petrov, for some reason). Dylan also stars alongside a bizarrely stacked cast. It’s set in a dystopian near-future America ruled by a dictator. Dylan is (yet again) a washed-up musician, this time named Jack Fate, who is bailed out of jail by some cynical entertainment promoters to perform a benefit concert for … America?

It’s very badly crafted, with clunky editing and a ponderous structure, but if you’re itching to hear old 1960s Dylan songs performed in weird new ways, you’re in luck. There’s an orchestral version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a hip-hop remix of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and more Dylan references than you can shake your guitar pick at — even though in this universe Bob Dylan cannot actually exist, because he’s playing Jack Fate. Apropos of nothing, a small girl is hauled out to sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” directly at Dylan. (To her credit, she’s pretty good.) Ed Harris also turns up in blackface. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

How to stream:

“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”: Available to buy or rent on various platforms.
“Renaldo and Clara”: Search for it on YouTube; it’s probably going to be in two parts.
“Hearts of Fire”: Available to buy or rent on various platforms.
“Catchfire” (also known as “Backtrack”): Available to buy or rent on various platforms, or watch for free on Tubi and Plex.
“Masked and Anonymous”: Available to buy or rent on various platforms.

Dylan, the Icon

The new century brought a new appreciation for the footage shot during Dylan’s early career. In his 60s, still recording and touring, he was nonetheless the representative of a generation. Restoring and revisiting that film provided a different vantage point for a familiar story, including his early years in the folk scene and the “Dylan goes electric” moment.

The most prominent of those films is probably “No Direction Home,” Scorsese’s lengthy and straightforward 2005 recounting of Dylan’s life between his arrival in New York in 1961 and the motorcycle accident that nearly ended his life five years later. Full of archival footage and interviews — including with Dylan himself — the film is comprehensive and sometimes meditative. It’s a rumination on what Dylan meant then and means now.

Two years later, Lerner returned with “The Other Side of the Mirror,” using footage shot for “Festival,” some of it previously unseen, that looks specifically at Dylan’s style shifts over his years at the Newport Folk Festival. It includes, once again, the electric set. Also in 2007, scenes that Pennebaker shot for “Dont Look Back” but didn’t include in the film were turned into “65 Revisited,” which focuses more on the musical performances than the previous film did. Dylan the musician comes to the fore — and, of course, even audiences who didn’t remember the original tour would know the songs by now. After all, they’re Dylan songs.

How to Stream

“No Direction Home”: Streaming on PBS Passport and Qello; available to buy or rent on various platforms.
“The Other Side of the Mirror”: Available to buy or rent on various platforms.
“65 Revisited” (2007): Search for it on YouTube.
A short detour: By now, Dylan was so iconic — and so iconoclastic — that he could perform the ultimate act of selling out, making commercials. Here’s a great supercut of those ads, including the 2004 Victoria’s Secret campaign and the 2014 Chrysler commercials.

Dylan, the Enigma

Dylan’s onscreen representation has veered intriguingly in recent years. In the past, filmmakers often tried to capture his essence, to explore his legacy. But the mystery of the artist who has shapeshifted and told tall tales his whole life, including in his own films, is getting more interesting. It’s as if he’s a key to understanding something about stardom in our age, though it’s left up to the viewer to decide what lock the key is meant for.

The first — and probably greatest — Dylan film of this era is Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” (2007), which barely mentions the artist but is unambiguously about him. Basically uncategorizable, “I’m Not There” enlists six actors to embody Dylan or, rather, versions of Dylan. Marcus Carl Franklin, for instance, is a boxcar-riding hobo child who calls himself Woody Guthrie and plays Dylan songs. Ben Whishaw, shot in black and white, says his name is Arthur Rimbaud and speaks in aphorisms to some unknown interlocutor. Christian Bale appears as Jack Rollins, a version of Dylan in his Christian phase, while Heath Ledger (in his last film released during his lifetime) plays an actor who plays Jack Rollins in a film. Richard Gere is here, too, but the real fireworks come with Cate Blanchett, as a disaffected and dissolute Dylan in his “Dont Look Back” phase.

It’s an astounding movie, probably the best biopic a Dylan aficionado could hope for. It captures the many roles that Dylan has tried on without falling prey to any explanatory fervor or biographical tropes. Footage of Dylan briefly appears at the end, but the point feels bigger than him: This is a guy who aimed at mythical status, and landed it.

Joel and Ethan Coen followed in 2013 with “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a movie that is not about Bob Dylan. Its protagonist, played by Oscar Isaac, is a cranky folk musician who performs at the Gaslight Cafe, one of Dylan’s haunts, and cannot catch a break. The Coens have said Llewyn’s music is based on that of Dave Van Ronk, a folk musician and familiar face around the Village right at the time Dylan arrived in town.

And, in fact, in the last moments of the film, Dylan does arrive. Llewyn has just performed a heartfelt rendition of his version of “Dink’s Song” (also called “Fare Thee Well”), a folk tune upon which many musicians have placed their fingerprint. He packs up his guitar and walks off, and in the back of the shot a scrawnier kid climbs the stool. It’s Bob, played by Benjamin Pike; he starts singing “Farewell,” a nod to Dylan’s continual evolving and repurposing of American musical traditions. We already know he’ll be famous. Poor Llewyn Davis.

Scorsese returned in 2019 with “Rolling Thunder Revue,” subtitled “A Bob Dylan Story,” which uses outtakes from “Renaldo and Clara” as well as new interviews with a number of figures, including Baez and Dylan. But there’s mischief afoot. Sharon Stone, for instance, tells a made-up tale about joining the Revue (she never did). The funniest joke for my money is the actor Michael Murphy’s appearance in character as the presidential candidate he plays in Robert Altman’s 1988 mini-series “Tanner ’88” and the subsequent 2004 mini-series “Tanner on Tanner.” It’s a heck of a deep cut, and the fact that he tells a completely made-up story about Dylan and Jimmy Carter makes it even funnier.

All of these are a fine lead-in to James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” which he wrote with the frequent Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks. Returning once again to Dylan’s early years in New York, the film stars an excellent Timothée Chalamet as the new kid in town, hauling a guitar and a huge well of talent. As the title implies, it’s a film about how unknowable Dylan actually is — and how that’s been a deliberate choice for him.

Like all the best Dylan movies, “A Complete Unknown” has one thing to say about him: You can’t know Dylan, as Dylan. You just know whatever he decides to be that day. And you get the sense, from all these movies, that if he ever revealed himself fully, we’d never know.

How to Stream