Walk the Line filmmaker James Mangold returns to the milieu of Sixties singer-songwriters with this contained portrait of Bob Dylan. Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan from the pivotal stretch of 1961 to 1965, from his open mic early days in Greenwich Village to the Newport Folk Festival barnburner where he famously went electric. (Johnny Cash – portrayed this time by Mangold’s Logan baddie Boyd Holbrook – also pops in now and then to growl sagely.)
That evolution – from a complete unknown to folk hero to Judas with an amplifier – complicates Dylan’s relationships both professional and romantic: To-rock-or-not-to-rock is presented as a kind of kill-your-daddies conundrum vis-à-vis his mentors Pete Seeger (Norton) and Woody Guthrie (McNairy), while his love life keeps snagging between art student Sylvie Russo (Fanning, in a lightly fictionalized version of the real-life Suze Rotolo) and Joan Baez (Barbaro), a much bigger star than Dylan when they first met.
That may sound like enough plot to hang a movie around, but Mangold and Jay Cocks’ script (adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties) is weirdly thin. It presumes viewers are learned enough to already know what role Dave Van Ronk played in the scene and which disease cruelly sent Guthrie to a premature death, but not sophisticated enough to intuit Dylan’s discomfort with his skyrocketing fame or chafing at expectations to stay in line, which the film dramatizes with all the subtlety of a hammer to the hand. Uniformly, the picture is admiring of Dylan, and entirely unilluminating.
Mangold has cast his hagiography well: Despite barely written roles, Barbaro and Fanning demand your attention; Norton makes sure Seeger’s fundamental decency doesn’t get subsumed by the aw shucks accent; and Norbert Leo Butz heroically accepts his assignment to play Alan Lomax as a sniveling villain. (You’d think the movie would have more respect for a guy willing to throw a punch over his ideals.) As for the main act? Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke. I don’t know who the audience is for that, but it ain’t me, babe.
This article appears in December 27 • 2024.
