DAN WEBSTER:
For anyone born in the 21st century, it’s difficult to explain just how profound an effect the man who became known as Bob Dylan had on the music of the mid-1960s.
I say “became known as Bob Dylan” because the man who would go on to become one of the most influential musicians of the previous century, and whose lyrics ended up winning him an improbable Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, began life in Hibbing, Minnesota, as a kid named Bobby Zimmerman.
Most Dylan fans know this fact and don’t really care. What’s important about all artists – at least those who haven’t been convicted of some serious offense (and, in some cases, even then) – is the art they’ve created. Besides, in Dylan’s case, the very myths that he wove around himself, myths that continued to evolve as the decades passed, were an essential part of his initial allure.
It's that allure that James Mangold captures so well in his look at the four-plus years of Dylan’s life, dating from his 1961 arrival in New York City to his famous—and to the likes of Pete Seeger and others infamous—appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Mangold does so by manufacturing a few myths of his own, as movies—but particularly movies that seek to explore the lives of real people—are wont to do. Working from a screenplay that he co-wrote with Jay Cocks and was adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 nonfiction book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, Mangold gives us an abbreviated, somewhat fictionalized but nevertheless powerful portrayal of time, place and of the several characters pertinent to Dylan’s story.
Portrayed by Timotheé Chalamet, Dylan arrives in New York, having hitchhiked in from Hibbing. And almost immediately, it seems, he finds his way to the New Jersey psychiatric hospital where he encounters the folk singers Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy), living there because he’d been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, and Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton). Both the veteran folkies end up admiring the tune Dylan wrote, titled “Song to Woody,” that he then proceeds to perform.
At this point it’s important to point out that, unlike most biopics, Mangold’s film has Chalamet doing all his own singing. As do, in fact, all of the singer-songwriters featured in the film, not just Norton as Seeger but also Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash. And while some fare better than others—as talented as Barbaro might be, no one could completely capture the unique sound of Joan Baez—Chalamet succeeds the best.
Then again, this should surprise no one. However much a fan as you are of Dylan, you have to admit that his singing was never anything “pretty,” as he says of Baez’s voice in the film. At his best, though, Dylan was always able to portray the messages that he wanted to get across, no matter how coded.
It’s important, too, to note that Mangold and Cocks didn’t take liberties just with the historical timeline (while the film makes him look like an overnight success, Dylan, truth be told, worked long and hard to become first a folk and then a rock hero). In their telling, too, Elle Fanning plays Dylan’s on-again, off-again lover Sylvie Russo, who is a substitute for the real-life Suze Rotolo.
And, of course, the real Rotolo didn’t accompany Dylan to the 1965 Newport tempest, when his insistence on going electric before a folk-music crowd caused such a furor that he stormed off the stage… only to return alone to deliver his pointed reaction by singing his tune “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
Still, most if not all of these inventions can be excused, given the richness of everything that Mangold has put on the screen… which, actually, is quite a change in style and theme from some of his past movies, such as Knight and Day, 3:10 to Yuma and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
As for the real-life Dylan, his defection from the folk movement put him at a creative crossroads. As he made clear in his 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone,” from which Mangold and Cocks got their title, “Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street, And now you're gonna have to get used to it.”
Get used to his new creative path Dylan did. And, in time, sublimely.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
——
Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.
