You don’t have to be a superfan or a folkie to get thoroughly engrossed in this richly detailed biopic from James Mangold, in which Timothée Chalamet uncannily recreates the young Bob Dylan.
This is an extraordinary performance, far deeper than an impersonation, that charts the progress of the singer-songwriter, the music scene he entered and altered, and events in the wider world during times that were urgently a’changin’.
He starts off a tousle-headed Minnesota neophyte, pitching up amid the coffee shops and acoustic nights of New York in 1961 to pay tribute to his dying hero, protest singer Woody Guthrie. By the end he’s the oddball, birdlike, black-plumaged messenger of change who outrages the 1965 Newport jazz festival by playing electric versions of Maggie’s Farm and Like a Rolling Stone.
Mangold, who co-wrote the script with Jay Cocks based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, clearly is a Dylan superfan, one of the worldwide army of acolytes who consider the protean workaholic a genius. (He is the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and at 83 is still on the so called “never ending tour” that began in June 1988.) But this Dylan is also, as his on-off collaborator and love interest Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) puts it, “kind of an asshole”.
It’s a defiantly unlikeable performance, miles away from Chalamet’s romantic leads. He captures Dylan’s craning stance and the way he used hair and sunglasses as a mask, the insistent buzz and keen of his speaking and singing voice and the odd, touchy, insularity.
His Dylan is fascinating because he’s enigmatic, wrapped up in himself and his solitary path. When people mob him and ask where his songs come from “they’re asking why songs don’t come to them”, he says. It’s the closest he gets to self-examination or explanation.
Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael make you feel the chill of the 1950s that still hung over early-Sixties New York, and the warm but stuffy atmosphere of the folk scene still stuck in the depression and the dustbowl. The film gets progressively lighter and sunnier as if each of Dylan’s hits – Blowin’ in the Wind, Subterranean Homesick Blues, It Ain’t Me Babe – kick it up a colour grade. It captures the anxiety of the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination, and the excitement of a music scene that was exploding. I didn’t even mind the lazy use of constant smoking as a period signifier.
Barbaro is spellbinding as a sweet-voiced, steel-willed Baez (though the camera does tend to linger on her bottom). She’s balanced by Elle Fanning as Bob’s brave, bruised first New York lover Sylvie (a fictionalised version of Suze Rotolo, the girl on his arm on the sleeve for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). Edward Norton gives a lovely, gentle performance as diffident revolutionary Pete Seeger.
If a few crucial moments are on the nose – a goodbye through a chainlink fence, Bob’s ears prinking like a fox’s to the sound of an electric piano chord – it doesn’t matter. And I particularly liked Bob getting his first big royalty check alongside a fan latter from Johnny Cash. Cash or cheque? Why not both.
My late dad played early Dylan all through my childhood but I thought I was indifferent to his lyrical charms and endless musical reinvention. This film reminded me that I knew every single banger in it and many more. And that I really, really want to learn to play harmonica.
In UK cinemas from January 17