Bob Dylan on Film: A Guide to the Movies’ True Shapeshifter

The singer-songwriter was never only a creature of music. Our critic watched every film with him that she could find to better understand the artist.

The concert stage-to-Hollywood highway has been wide and inviting for decades. Everyone from Elvis and the Beatles to Madonna and Taylor Swift has journeyed down that road. But there’s something unique about Bob Dylan’s big-screen presence. He is Dylan the troubadour, Dylan the documentary subject, Dylan the car commercial star, Dylan the lurking stranger with a very sharp knife. Over seven decades, he’s been ubiquitous, but never predictable.

Then again, Dylan has always seemed to be playing a role, including the role of Bob Dylan. (He was born Robert Zimmerman.) He appeared in the world as a folk singer of protest songs, then blew all that up to go electric, a moment that’s so culturally significant that it’s served as the focal point for a whole lot of movies about him.

Watching every one of those films suggests he is at his core a prankster, or maybe more properly a trickster: Whenever he’s become predictable, he changes. The most successful, or at least fascinating, of these movies tends to mess in one way or another with his seemingly carefree relationship to notions of authenticity or identity. The new biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet, posits Dylan as the prototypical postmodern artist, appearing in the world at a moment when notions of objective truth and artistic dogma were being blown to smithereens. The world is changeable and confusing; why shouldn’t an artist be?

His early career coincides neatly with the rise of direct cinema and observational documentary, facilitated in part by advancements in recording technology. Directors could capture sound and image on the same film, and their equipment was getting lighter and more portable, making it easier to rush down a hallway behind a singer headed to a stage, or sit relatively unobtrusively in the corner of a hotel room or back of a car.