STARRING: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbet Leo Butz and Scoot NcNairy. Screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks. Directed by James Mangold. Budget $50-70 million. Running time 2 hours and 20 minutes.
Following the early years of Bob Dylan's professional career, from hitch-hiking in 1961 to New York to visit Willie Guthrie in hospital, to over night sensation, and to his first electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk festival where he was famously heckled as 'Judas'.
From beginning to end this is Timothée Chalamet's film, his utterly mesmerising performance grabs your complete attention from the first second he appears on screen in the back of car as a hitchhiker to the last as he rides off on his motorbike, 140 minutes later that seem to have flashed by in the blink of an eye.
His vocal portrayal of Dylan is superb capturing the tone and style perfectly, his performance of the man himself is twitchy and buttoned up, he comes across as a man unable to sleep without an audience and bridled with a creative force that seems to consume him wholeheartedly. But he's not alone, everyone involved with in this film delivers wonderful performances, singing and playing their own instruments, from Monica Barbaro's depiction of Joan Baez, to Edward Norton's political activist and folk legend Pete Seeger, to Boyd Holbrooks' Johnny Cash. And complementing them all is Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a fictional version of Dylan's first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo after Dylan asked the film not use her real identity.
The styling of New York in the 1960s seems perfect, at no point do you find yourself dragged out of the illusion and throughout it all the sound track is pure Dylan. Indeed you could be mistaken for believing that this is a full out musical, since Chalamet sings a total of 40 Dylan songs in their entirety, while playing the guitar and harmonica and were all recorded live.
This is a very straight forward sort of musical bio-pic, that sort of thing that Hollywood used to make back in the 50s, like one of my favourites, The Glenn Miller Story, which offered not one iota of detail about Glenn Miller's actual life.
It's a $70 million dollar Karaoke movie, a visual and musical delight that captivates completely and yet you'll leave the film knowing nothing about the man himself beyond what's on display – that he was a singularly driven young man consumed by music and its creation and that he was a 'tad' ego-centric. If you go in expecting a warts-and-all expose of Bob Dylan you're going to leave a little frustrated, cos you ain't gonna get it, but then maybe that's the truth of the whole thing, maybe there is no deeper hidden truth, and why should there be? He was only 20 years-old at the beginning of the film and 25 at its end. Although I did discover, much to my delight, that he was penpals with Johnny Cash.
One of the things that surprised me while watching this film was that I knew so many of his songs almost verbatim and I realised that with the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie, Bob Dylan has been a part of my life's soundtrack for so long that i don't remember the first time I heard his music. It's made me want to listen and find out more about him and any film that can make you do that can't be all bad.
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