Watched the Dylan movie last night, and was pleasantly surprised. I was afraid that Timothee Chalamet might phone it in by acting with his puppy-dog eyes, looking up from under his eyebrows all the time — and there is some of that — but I came away mostly impressed. He did a respectable job of playing the young Dylan, surly and moody but also brilliant. And his guitar playing and singing was impressive from someone who didn’t play before he started filming the movie. I knew he could do a good job of that part when I saw him on Saturday Night Live, when he chose to do several little-known Dylan songs — and did them extremely well. The actress who plays Joan Baez also does an incredible job, and I have to give some props to Ed Norton too, who played Pete Seeger to a T and even learned how to play the banjo for the part, which is not an easy thing to do.
Liberties were taken with the script, obviously. Elle Fanning’s character, who is supposed to be Suze Rotolo, never went to the Newport Folk Festival with Dylan on his motorcyle (he wasn’t even riding a motorcycle at that point), and Johnny Cash comes off as a bit of a cartoon. Joan Baez comes off a little nicer than I think she was in real life (I think even Joan would agree with me there) and events are squished together in various ways. The concert scene at Newport where Dylan played electric is played up a lot more than I think it was in real life (although I wasn’t there) — from what I’ve read, Pete Seeger was mostly upset that the sound was terrible, not that it was electric, and some of those who were there said that the crowd booed because the set was too short, not because they were folk purists who didn’t like electric music. Dylan’s electric album was already out and very popular by then.
The movie also leaves out a bunch of people who were instrumental (sorry) in Dylan’s career, like Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — and Dylan’s first wife, whom he had already married by the end of the time period the movie covers. Anyway, long story short I thought it was pretty good. The only thing that makes me wonder how realistic some of it is is that Dylan was a producer, and had script approval, and apparently even inserted a scene that never happened (although the director refuses to say which one). Dylan has always been the least reliable narrator of his own life, going back to when he buried Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota and invented the character he became in New York. But what a character 🙂 At one point in the movie, Chalamet says that “if anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak,” and I don’t know if Dylan ever said that, but he’s not wrong.
@mathewi I think the scene where the audience member shouted Judas at Dylan happened in Manchester UK!