Jake Goldstein-Street’s review published on Letterboxd:
You know, you're kind of an asshole
Man, you know you've got an incredible catalog when they can make a 135-minute movie about the first five years of your career and it's basically all just songs.
Truly such little story here propelling the plot. The only thing keeping us going is figuring out which Bob Dylan classic is coming next. The narrative tension does pick up in the 1965 chapter for obvious reasons, though even the Newport framing is awkward as it's made to seem more about this specific festival than about the movement.
But it is in this final act that Timothee Chalamet's Dylan comes alive. This is when his performance goes electric, after hobbling through the first 90 minutes mumbling and straight faced. Here is where he has personality and attitude. This is why you cast Chalamet. The New York fuckboi comes alive.
The similarities with WALK THE LINE are pretty hard to miss here, including Johnny Cash literally being in this movie. But where the love triangle dynamic basically made the former, that template almost dooms this one. There's just not a lot there to warrant how much we're expected to buy into it. The female characters have absolutely no dimension, so they almost just act as vessels to get us from one song to the next, instead of driving any sort of interesting plot forward. But thankfully those songs are some of the best of the century. I practically cried at "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
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