Bob Dylan In The Movies: The All-Over-The-Map Screen Career of a Music Legend

Bob Dylan loves movies—his songwriting is filled with cinematic references ranging from Gregory Peck to Sophia Loren to Titanic—but it’s not always clear that movies love him back. Unlike music, in which his creative dominion is so overarching as to seem boundless, Dylan’s experiences with the film business have been far more checkered. He’s written and directed movies, been the subject of many documentaries, acted in small roles and cameo appearances and the occasional lead, if that’s what you’d call his roles in Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous. He has been a key inspiration for such wonderful, ambitious films like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. On the looming occasion of James Mangold’s new biopic A Complete Unknown, we’ve taken the opportunity to survey the man’s long, strange journey through the silver screen. Get your popcorn, pour yourself a glass of Planet Waves and, as Warner Wolf says, let's go to the videotape.

The Essentials

DON'T LOOK BACK, Bob Dylan, 1967Courtesy Everett Collection

Dylan’s first great cinematic enterprise was helmed by the legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, and is a landmark of intense concert performance, innovative editing and remarkably bad behavior. Following Dylan on his 1966 tour of England, we witness him in full enfant-terrible mode, marauding through parties and backstage scenes proffering withering insults and asides, egged on by his insufferably cool wingman Bobby Neuwirth. By the time of the film’s 1967 release, Dylan had already been a major cultural figure for several years, and was riding a narrowly-precedented creative hot streak that included the astonishing LP triptych Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, all released in an eighteen month blur and blitz of wild-eyed artistry. He is in his high glamour phase here, bursting with genius and pharmaceutical energy, narrowly sane, all manner of madness clattering around him. Many things happen during the film's 96-minute run time. There is the famous, oft-imitated proto-music video where he flips through cue cards featuring the lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while Alan Ginsburg skulks about mysteriously in the background.

There is Dylan’s weird and off-putting treatment of his on again off again paramour/emotional punching bag Joan Baez, who having first used her stardom to vault Dylan into the public consciousness, has now been eclipsed by his supernova, and follows him from show to show, waiting for an invitation to duet on stage which never comes. (It is said that he had invited her with this promise and then reneged on it.) Here we see him disinterestedly clacking away at a typewriter, while Baez serenades him with one of his own songs, and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman appears bemused.

There is his song-circle with Donovan, the very fine Scottish songwriter who is not as good as Dylan because no one is, which somehow transforms into a kind of ritual humiliation when Dylan follows Donovan’s plaintive, delicate “To Sing for You” with the harrowing, world’s end lament “It’s All Over Now (Baby Blue).”

Ritual humiliation is a big part of Dylan’s milieu here, which can be painful.

This is a strikingly different version of the emergent rock star as pop cultural phenom than the Beatles had presented in Richard Lester’s urgent, infectious A Hard Day's Night from 1964, or the following year’s Help!, with its technicolor glow and silly capers. In A Hard Day’s Night, we see a scripted version of the Fab Four’s famed, irreverent interactions with the mainstream news media — still a monolithically influential entity at this juncture — and dispositionally inclined to be dismissive of youth culture. In Don’t Look Back we see Dylan engaging with the fourth estate as well, but in far less conciliatory terms. The Beatles gently needled the reporters tasked with explaining to their older viewership precisely what was behind and beyond the post-war youthquake phenomenon. Dylan took a different tack. He was abusive. The deeply uncomfortable six-and-a-half minute segment wherein he browbeats Time Magazine’s London arts and science correspondent Horace Freeland Judson is a tour-de-force of twitchy, amphetamine-addled insult comedy, though it isn’t really very funny. Anyone who has ever worked as a reporter and interviewed a surly subject will relate to Judson’s predicament. His job is to explain the Dylan phenomenon to his readers. Dylan evinces bottomless contempt for him on the basis of his appearance alone—“I know more about what you do just by looking than you’ll ever know about me.” Surrounded by hipster acolytes and sporting his trademark sweeping curly locks and perfect bone structure, he relentlessly torments Judson, whose exasperated, puffy face seems to drain of blood as the ordeal proceeds. It is impossible to know what justification Dylan feels in this moment, but soon enough he’ll know about instant karma.

Everett Collection

Certainly one of the finest, if not the best, film in the Dylan Cinematic Universe, Todd Haynes’ beautifully fractured 2007 biopic featured six different actors portraying Dylan in various stages of his real and imagined life. That gambit—which saw sundry iterations of the songwriter played by everyone from Richard Gere to Heath Ledger—takes the meta-narrative and revolving-identity preoccupations of Dylan's auteur projects Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous and fleshes them out into a thoughtful, moving anthology that serves as the kind of cinematic analog to his music that Dylan no doubt imagined his own films to be. At the risk of sounding churlish, it seems likely that the best explanation for why I’m Not There succeeds where its forerunners foundered is the most obvious: Haynes is a professional filmmaker and not a moonlighting hobbyist who assumed enjoying Fellini movies was the same as being able to make them.

So many moments of I’m Not There stand out, but few are better than Cate Blanchett eerily channeling the essence of Dylan, as he breaks ideological faith with the folk community at the Newport Festival in 1965, the same source material that is dealt with in the new Chalamet vehicle. Chalamet will have a lot to contend with, comparison-wise.

My favorite scene from I’m Not There is when Christian Bale croons “Pressing On,” a strenuously forceful devotional from Dylan’s 1980 gospel album Saved, to what appears to be a small community gathering or twelve step meeting. Lip-synching to John Doe’s remarkable rendition, Christian Bale channels the endlessly contradictory impulses of a man who has no contradiction at all because he doesn’t even exist, or at least that’s what he wants you to think.

“Many try to stop me, shake me up in my mind,

Say, "Prove to me that He is Lord, show me a sign."

Ain’t no stopping him now. He’s on the move.

Originally released as part of PBS’s American Masters series, Martin Scorsese's 206-minute documentary covers Dylan’s early years as a musician, as he arrived in New York City and proceeded to embroider himself into the flourishing West Village folk scene, where figures like Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, and Harry Belafonte ruled the roost, and follows him through his return to the electric music of his early youth and the ensuing acoustic versus electric controversy that is the subject of A Complete Unknown. Abetted by access to previously unavailable and hard-to-find footage, and by unusually cogent and unguarded interviews with Dylan himself, No Direction Home is one of the most revealing and demystifying of any of his adjacent films. Frequently evasive or dismissive of his childhood and past, here Dylan is eloquent and expansive about his origin story. Born to a middle-class, slightly circumscribed existence in Hibbing, Minnesota, part of the Midwest’s Iron Range, he was surrounded by small town Americana, farmland and mining companies stripping the horizon of whatever held value. Through this paradigm, you begin to better grasp the underlying neurosis of his larger vision: the predation of the powerful against the earnest.

No Direction Home also features electric live footage, delightfully strange transgressions and wonderful time capsule interviews with the likes of the Clancy Brothers, Dylan’s early-’60s partner Suzi Rotolo and the Mayor of MacDougal Street himself Dave Van Ronk. A powerful history.

Flawed But Fascinating:

RENALDO AND CLARA, Bob Dylan, 1978, (c) Lombard Street Films / Courtesy: Everett CollectionLombard Street Films / Courtesy: Everett Collection

Renaldo and Clara is a surpassingly weird thing that Dylan did that just keeps getting weirder as you peel back the layers, until the whole thing is an uncontrollable situation mentally. Which is of course exactly what he wants. The extravagantly expensive, generally thought to be incoherent four-hour-or-so-mostly-improvised cinematic handmaiden to his celebrated Rolling Thunder Revue has long been understood to be unavailable. That was my carve-out here, before my editor “Alex P.” pointed out that it is currently on YouTube for anyone to see. And sure, I wondered: how many times did he search YouTube for Renaldo and Clara before striking gold? But mostly I just felt gratitude, as there is no excuse now for not watching the entire thing for this piece. Thanks, “Alex P.”

There is a lot of priceless concert footage in Renaldo and Clara taken from the first leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, much of which is repurposed and expanded upon in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. That is the good news. The less good news is the rest of Dylan’s narrative treatise on slippery identities, doppelgangers and (I guess) the nature of celebrity is not, strictly speaking, watchable. But I did watch it! So let me tell you a few things that happen in just the first half hour:

• Renaldo and Clara opens with Dylan on stage looking very frightening in some kind of vinyl, see-through mask that is one-part kabuki, one-part body-wrapped-in-plastic-and-dropped-in-a-river, duetting on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” alongside Bob Neuwirth.
• Soon we cut to the folk singer David Blue playing pinball and babbling on about New York’s West Village scene in the early ‘60s. He is not particularly good at either pinball or explaining the downtown folk scene—he seems distracted, maybe stoned. He mutters glumly. This goes on for five uninterrupted minutes. For those who did not find the vinyl mask a barrier for entry, this is their reward.
• Here is Bob Dylan jamming on an acoustic guitar, pulling blues flourishes in something like a backstage area. His then-wife Sara Lowndes is draped over him. We are supposed to understand, I think, that this is not Bob Dylan after all, but instead “Renaldo.” She is, I think, “Clara.” They mutter glumly, the dialog most likely improvised. Like most of the movie, the scene is grainy and dark. Howard Alk, credited as main cinematographer, does not appear to have done even the most perfunctory of lighting or prep work, which may not be his fault, since Dylan and his co-writer Sam Shepard seemed to aspire to a “verite” style which just involved turning the camera on whenever the traveling troupe was doing literally anything. Or nothing.
• Cut to Ronnie Hawkins, the leader of the legendary rockabilly group the Hawks. He is playing, I think, a performer named Bob Dylan, in a traveling troupe. He is trying to seduce a young lady to leave her innocence behind and head out on the road with a band of rockers. She protests that her father, a farmer, has not given his approval. Hawkins, as Dylan, explains that he’ll never approve, being that he is a farmer and not a rocker, but if she’ll just try it out for a couple of months he’ll happily send her home if she doesn’t like it. It is hard to know if Hawkins is directed to be salacious, or if this is just his natural presentation, but the net effect is uncomfortable on a seismic scale.
• For some reason, now comes a spirited performance of “Hurricane,” the first track on Dylan’s 1975 release Desire, which is about the (maybe) wrongful prosecution of the middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. It is unclear what the song has to do with what Paul Harvey would call the rest of the “story.”

Look, I think you get the idea. Dylan’s initial foray into film directing didn’t go smoothly. Let's move on.

Everett Collection

I guess the relevant context here is that Dylan’s career was far from in great shape in 1987. His albums had become ever more strange and shambolic. His concerts were some of his most perfunctory, least committed ever. He seemed distracted from, maybe even annoyed by his genius. So, by Dylan logic, it makes every kind of sense that this would be the moment he would attempt his cinematic analog to Purple Rain. Look — I’ve tried to play straight with you this whole way through, and I’ll continue now. I don’t know why Hearts of Fire exists, I don’t know what Dylan is doing in it, and probably the less said the better.

A provisional summary:

In Hearts of Fire Bob is a legendary rock star that no one knows anymore — a point he’s eager to make as frequently as possible. I think a love triangle is involved and here’s the culminating action: The drummer is shirtless. The singer is off-brand Janis. The lead guitarist is Dylan. Hearts catch fire. The tambourine man is drunk.

Essential but Frightening:

Filled with mysterious ephemera, this long lost documentary is a follow-up of sorts to Don’t Look Back, only darker and weirder. Originally commissioned by ABC, the initial plan was to have D.A. Pennebaker again film Dylan on tour in Europe, this time in 1966, as he and the Hawks marauded from stage to stage playing to audiences frequently scandalized by their brash new, electric sound. Apparently displeased with the initial edit, Dylan decided to recut the film himself, despite having no experience as a filmmaker at this juncture, because of course. Unsurprisingly, much of the end result was utterly baffling (in a preview of future endeavors, Renaldo and Clara cinematographer Howard Alk lent a hand), or at least not at all what ABC had hoped for—they promptly refused to air the film, no doubt leery of exploding the heads of their audience. Indeed, you can hardly blame them. There is a jittery, menacing feeling to it that can at times feel aggressively paranoid. As was the case with Don’t Look Back, the live footage captured is astonishing—some of it is repurposed in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home, including the infamous incident when an audience member shouts out “Judas!” as Dylan and the Hawks take the stage in Manchester.

Dylan responds witheringly—“I don’t believe you! You’re a liar!”, while telling his band in an aside, “Play it fucking loud!” before launching into the then relatively new “Like a Rolling Stone.” This is one of the crucial animating moments in the Dylan legend, and watching the footage of it can still bring chills. Other aspects of Eat The Document are chilling for different reasons. Dylan is…not well. Still a wrecking ball on stage, he is emaciated and unsteady off it. A historically resonant but unpleasant piece of footage finds him and John Lennon sharing a taxi, and Lennon becoming gradually more annoyed and disturbed as Dylan rants incoherently about Johnny Cash, Tyrone Power and…it’s not totally clear. “It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” Dylan told the journalist Robert Shelton around the same time. "A concert tour like this has almost killed me." The Lennon taxi ride suggests he was not exaggerating.

Dylan would of course ultimately outlast nearly every one of his most significant ‘60s music business peers—in some cases by several decades. Eat the Document captures a moment in which that outcome seemed precarious at best and unlikely at worst.

Director Sam Peckinpah with Dylan, 1973Everett Collection

Sam Peckinpah’s languid and sorrowful retelling of the Billy the Kid saga is a film which somehow manages to capture everything beautiful and belligerent about that great and greatly difficult director’s oeuvre. Kris Kristofferson makes for a charismatic, ebullient Billy and James Coburn is perfectly cast as Pat Garrett. It’s not the best of the revisionist Westerns of the era—Robert Altman’s similarly-themed McCabe and Mrs. Miller makes most of the same points more poetically —but the picture's most kinetic moments tend to align with Dylan’s wonderful soundtrack, a profoundly moving score whose deep empathy in some ways suggests he understood the source material perhaps better than the director.

But there’s more! Dylan plays a small role in the film as a mysterious henchman of few words named Alias (masked and anonymous, get it?). He absolutely steals this scene:

In the end, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a solidly told Western morality play frequently undercut by the sort of malicious violence that tended to override the best of Peckinpah’s instincts. (Even Quentin Tarantino expressed an objection to an actual turkey’s head being shot off during the filming.) A difficult watch, but ultimately a rewarding one. The pathologically murderous filmmaker meets the most humanistic of songwriters, and somehow a doorway to salvation emerges.

Everett Collection

The first time I saw Masked And Anonymous, twenty years ago, I felt like a dog hit on the head with a pencil. Total, abject confusion. Rewatching it recently, the experience was not too different. A collaboration between Dylan and Seinfeld writer and director Larry Charles—Dylan and Charles wrote the script together, and Charles directed—I guess the film could broadly be described as a rambling, slapstick comedy about imminent apocalypse. Seemingly inspired by Stanley Kramer’s 1963 kitchen-sink-gag-fest It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, whose oddball cast of thousands included everyone from Mickey Rooney to Spencer Tracy to Ethel Merman to Sid Caesar, Dylan and Charles appear to have written a part for every one of their favorite working actors: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson, Mickey Rourke and Angela Bassett are just some of the names that turn up. Dylan himself stars as Jack Fate, a once legendary folk singer who has hit the skids and ended up in prison. Now listen: I don’t feel like I am really the person to try to explain the plot—my personal grasp on reality is already fairly shaky to begin with. But I will try.

All of the world's nations are locked in an ongoing religious war, the actual reasons for which have long been forgotten. Any semblance of remaining government consists entirely of shadowy cabals and despoiled actors engaged in a sinister roundelay of limitless financial and moral corruption. Some of these malign actors decide it is important to hold a benefit concert, with Jack Fate as the headliner. He is released from prison for this purpose. At one point, Jeff Bridges, playing a doomed investigative journalist, says to Dylan’s Jack Fate: “You know the singer from the Bee Gees? He sounds a lot like Gene Pitney.” There is a concert that is interrupted by an armed insurgency. The journalist is stabbed with a knife or a broken bottle and then beaten to death with a guitar. Jack Fate gets sent back to prison. Look, this is the best I can do, You're just going to have to go watch if you want more.

Is Masked and Anonymous a good movie? I don’t think you can really make the case, credibly. Roger Ebert, in keeping with the broader critical community, gave it a half star and called it “a vanity production beyond all reason.” Is it an interesting movie? That’s a harder question. There’s lots of great music, both from Dylan and his band and others recording old Dylan songs in other languages.

Masked and Anonymous revisits Renaldo and Clara’s obsession with slippery, shifting identities, situational ethics and the very nature of reality, but once again, it's difficult to say that the narrative does so legibly enough to convey real depth of feeling. Compelling sequences and montages run up against long stretches of dialog that seem obviously improvised, and not with any great skill. The whole thing is a rope of sand — impossible to grasp — which may very well have been his intention. At a minimum, the ensuing two decades since the film’s release have brought us closer and not further from the unsettling dichotomy of mass distraction and ultra-violence that the picture portrays, and that is probably its dark-hearted legacy. Never bet against humanity's capacity for evolving new and more insidious modes of deprivation, Dylan seems to be telling us. Morbid and troubling.

Everett Collection

Yet another ill-starred network TV tie-in, NBC first aired this raw and anxious final exertion from the second, more difficult leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Filmed in a stadium in Ft. Collins, Colorado during a literal driving rain storm, the performance is a million miles from the beatific, community-centric small theater shows of the Revue's initial performances. Here, between the awful weather, the less than ideal setting and a general feeling of ennui, the vibes are pretty bad. But the music is pretty great! This is the sound of a road-hardened group pounding nails, doing the job. There are times they seem like they are rushing to get the thing over with, but that paradoxically gives the performances their power. Check out this glammed-up version of “Maggie’s Farm,” featuring some blistering guitar work from erstwhile Spider from Mars Mick Ronson.

The fraught emotional high point is a ten-minute take on the famously caustic breakup number “Idiot Wind,” featuring an even-more-vituperative-than usual vocal, and some great pedal steel work from David Mansfield.

It is said, perhaps apocryphally, that Dylan was in an especially ill humor on this day, having been confronted by surprise by his wife Sara, who had shown up unannounced with the intention of policing his extracurriculars. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s not—I wasn’t there. Regardless, the feeling of recrimination of one kind or another is palpable. NBC eventually aired the hour-long broadcast on May 23, 1976. Not many tuned in at the time, but Hard Rain remains a fascinating bit of Dylan’s legacy.

Final Testaments:

This hour-long film—included as a DVD add-in to the stupendous gospel years-spanning Bootleg Series entry of the same name—is pretty phenomenal in its own right. Your mileage no doubt varies on how you experience Dylan’s late ‘70s, early ‘80s gospel period—it's a particular favorite of mine, but remains somewhat polarizing—but any fan will get a kick out of this ragtag collection of rehearsal and concert footage, along with running commentary from his fan base, much of it baffled-again by his born-again conversion. In addition, the film is threaded through with scenes of Michael Shannon playing a charismatic preacher, delivering sermons authored by the writer Lucy Santé. This latter detail could be catastrophically distracting or annoying, but somehow manages not to be—Sante’s words and Shannon’s oratory convey real passion.

Dylan’s played with a lot of great live bands—The Band, the Dead, the Heartbreakers—but for my money he never assembled a better one than on his gospel tours: guitarist Fred Tackett, bassist Tim Drummond, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, drummer Jim Keltner and the indelible background singers dubbed the Queens of Rhythm. Folks, this band flat out smoked.

Get ye that old time religion!

A 2007 documentary directed by Murray Lerner which originally aired on the BBC, this follows Dylan through three successive appearances at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, ‘64 and ‘65. Filled with remarkable footage, some of it embroidered from Lerner’s previous classic 1967 documentary Festival! The Other Side Of The Mirror provides a highly useful context for the 1965 Dylan-goes-electric controversy central to A Complete Unknown. The transformation from the earnest, humble Dylan of 1963 into the caustic spitfire that emerged just a couple years later is truly startling to behold. Dylan has always been coy about his early relationship to what is frequently called (for lack of a better term) “protest music,” but watching him perform a powerful but painfully earnest version of “Only A Pawn In Their Game” in 1963, his dedication to socially conscious folk music is in plain evidence.

It can be difficult, for me anyway, to understand why exactly Dylan’s decision to play electric rock was considered such a betrayal by many of his fans and folk purists like Pete Seeger, but Lerner’s film fills in blanks. Watching Dylan at an afternoon workshop singing the miner’s ballad “North Country Blues” in full Woody Guthrie dudgeon, you understand how deeply defined his anti-capitalist, aggressively progressive persona truly was. The outrage over his sudden embrace of rock and roll was less about the sonics and more about the ethos. It seemed he had abandoned the underdog, in search of the greener commercial pastures of the Beatles and Byrds.

With sixty years of hindsight, we can all acknowledge that this was a misapprehension. But in depicting the strident, principled, charming, ever-slightly more user-friendly early Dylan at the most hallowed of roots music showcases, we better understand the rage and derision that followed from his throwing off the first of what he would no doubt think of as many masks.