Director James Mangold’s mesmerizing depiction of Bob Dylan’s early years is laden with electrifying moments.
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| Early on, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is the self-assured, veteran stage performer, and Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) is just a nervous kid ... but that dynamic changes quickly, and quite dramatically. |
It’s January 1961: a quietly intimate moment in the hospital room where Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) has long been under care for Huntington’s disease (for which there was no treatment, at the time). His frequent visitor is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who has learned how to understand his longtime friend’s mostly unintelligible attempts at speech. Young Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) appears in the doorway; Seeger invites him inside.
Guthrie spots the guitar slung against Dylan’s back, and gestures for a song.
The young man obliges.
Like ... wow.
Movie magic at its finest.
A similarly powerful scene comes much later; it involves a cigarette passed between two people standing on opposite sides of a chain-link fence: unexpectedly sweet, intimate ... and sad.
Mangold and co-scripter Jay Cocks based their film on Elijah Wood’s 2015 non-fiction book, Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties. The result is rigorously authentic to actual events — warts and all — allowing for occasional fabrications for dramatic purposes. The time frame is brief, from early 1961 to the galvanic, game-changing evening of July 25, 1965, during Dylan’s closing set at that year’s Newport Folk Festival.
To say that Chalamet fully inhabits this performance is the worst of understatements. It isn’t merely an uncanny replication of Dylan’s look, posture, mannerisms and the cadence of his mumbled, almost whispered speaking voice. Chalamet also sings and performs more than 40 songs during the course of this rhapsodic film, often sounding more like Dylan than the man himself.
The dramatic arc here will be familiar to those who’ve followed the careers of artists who burst explosively onto the scene, and then become pigeon-holed. Some are content to stay in such boxes, cheerfully riding the money machine; others — the genuinely talented — chafe at public expectations.
The resulting weight can be crippling. What, if anything, does an artist owe his public?
