A Million $ Bash Roundtable

We are entering a season of maximum hype for the Timothée Chamalet vehicle, James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown. The release date is December 25, 2024, and I, for one, can wait.

It’s not that I don’t dearly love movies about Bob Dylan; it’s just that I don’t trust this particular director to create anything but a feel-good yawner complete with loving recreations of settings and a superficial interest in actual biographical events. But that’s me.

Besides, haven’t we already traversed the Dylan bio-pic territory with I’m Not There? Granted, even diehard Dylan fans have found it hard to digest, but isn’t that how it should be? In my case, I think I’m Not There is about as suitable (and excellent) a crack at a Dylan bio-pic that we shall ever see.

The eminent filmmaker Todd Haynes, is known for such masterpieces as Far from Heaven, The Velvet Goldmine, Carol, and last year’s May December. His first movie, the highly acclaimed and now legally banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, told its tale using Barbie dolls, so you know that Haynes is not conventional in any way.

Indeed, his 2007 film, I’m Not There, is anything but your grandpa’s bio-pic. For one thing, absolutely no one in the film is named “Bob Dylan”—the feature’s ostensible subject. In fact, no one utters the words “Bob Dylan,” and many of the events depicted have, at most, a tangential relationship to the life and times of said Bob Dylan. On the other hand, Dylan’s music features prominently and wonderfully throughout/ and some settings, dialogue, and events are Dylan lyrics put to film.

If you are not aware or need a reminder, in the film six actors portray six characters who correspond somewhat to aspects of Dylan’s life and personality although some scenes fall clearly into the sub-genre of “what if.” What if Bob Dylan found Jesus in the mid-sixties and became a Pentecostal minister? What if Bob Dylan were an actor portraying a Bob Dylan-like character in a bio-pic.

The characters that stand in for Dylan are an 11-year-old Black hobo, a nearly-hermit-like aging cowboy, a hotshot actor with a passion for cheating on his artist-wife, a folksinger turned small-time devout preacher, a poet who’s being interrogated for some reason, and a hipster rockstar immersed in a world of amphetamine and androgyny.

Meanwhile, several other characters in the movie are Dylan-adjacent: an Albert Grossman-like manager; a Joan Baez-like folksinger brilliantly played by perennial Haynes actor, Julianne Moore; a Bobby Neuwirth-type sidekick; and, also for some reason, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Allan Ginsburg. That last one is wonderfully portrayed by David Cross.

And for good measure, this non-bio-pic shows us the actor-character, Robbie Clark, in a scene from his bio-pic of Jack Rollins. For those at home keeping score, that’s a fictional bio-pic of a fictional character within a non-bio-pic of a real person. Still with me?

As biography, I’m Not There falls way short, but it never fully attempts biography. Indeed, like Dylan’s unreliable memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, and Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, it is a meta-biography that uncovers the constructedness of Bob Dylan in our culture. Furthermore as a non-bio-pic or even a meta-bio-pic, it explores the fraught limitations and possibilities of biography itself, particularly when it is contained entirely within the four corners of a screen.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. 
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

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