With James Mangold’s new film A Complete Unknown offering audiences the first conventional Hollywood biopic of Bob Dylan, now is a good time to revisit and reconsider Dylan’s own cinematic legacy. Although it stretches back some six decades, that legacy is modest, uneven, and often exasperating. But the 20th century’s greatest American singer-songwriter has nonetheless maintained a filmography of sorts, appearing in films made by others and films he has made himself. The results have been mixed, but never less than interesting.
Most of Dylan’s films have been met with ambivalence or worse. They have certainly not left anything like the cultural footprint of his songs. He has never appeared in a cinematic hit and most of his films have not even been widely seen, sometimes at Dylan’s own behest. Nonetheless, over the years, they have slowly built cult audiences who find them a source of perpetual fascination and frustration. With one exception, they are not entirely without their virtues, and several are underrated and ripe for rediscovery and reassessment.
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Dylan made his film debut in a film about himself. D.A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back was nothing like as successful as Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock (1957) or the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). But Pennebaker’s rough, fly-on-the-wall style became massively influential even so. His unobtrusive handheld camera follows Dylan through streets and hotel rooms and press conferences and concert halls during his final acoustic tour of England in 1965, and Dylan later admitted that he quickly became oblivious to the presence of the crew. The combination of intimacy and immediacy makes the film feel as if it has somehow been conjured out of reality itself. It is as if the camera does not exist and we are being offered an unmediated window into someone’s life.
