Wilhelm Scream’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
I wanted to see this again just because I liked it a lot, but also to test a hypothesis I was left thinking about after my first viewing. Turns out I was wrong, there actually ARE a few scenes where Bob appears onscreen alone with no one else around, most notably as he's watching the news about the Cuban Missile Crisis on TV. My thought had been that in order to enhance the impression that Dylan was a constructed persona who existed only within the perception of others, he was shown only in scenes with other people, and never alone.
Even though I was technically incorrect (the best kind of incorrect), the film still definitively chooses to emphasize the self-made myth of the man, especially by never delving into his childhood or life before 1961, nor anything after 1965. In this way the film also deftly sidesteps many of the tired clichés found in most biopics; the childhood traumas, the falls from grace. Here, other than some forced melodrama with Sylvie/Suze (a plate, really?), the film manages to steer clear of too much cheese.
This second time around I also got more of a sense of Dylan as a cultural predator, glaring with hooded eyes and baleful covetousness at Guthrie, Seeger, Baez, and the whole folk scene. I mean he wasn't JUST a rolling stone come to appropriate their best and flatten the rest... but he wasn't NOT that. His reluctant encore at Newport features him weaponizing the lyrics, "The vagabond who's rapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore" to repudiate and depose the entire community that once took him in with open hearts and high hopes.
Also... how the hell is that Boyd Holbrook?
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