.jpg)
19 hours ago
1
From concert films and documentaries to biopics, we review 10 other Bob Dylan movies available to stream online right now.
Amazon
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown is essentially an origin story: A young artist moves to the city and becomes who he is. Influenced by American icons like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Dylan makes a name for himself in the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, then pushes against the genre’s limitations and “goes electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The fans there, many earnest lefties who valued authenticity over artistry, didn’t know what hit them. Dylan became a bona fide rock star – one that would constantly follow his own muse.
The movie, which started streaming on Hulu last week, is a fantastic introduction to one of rock’s most important artists. It’s both accessible and mythic, and actor Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s smart-ass charisma. But it’s only the beginning of Dylan’s story – and of his life onscreen. If you want to see what happens next – or how it really happened, or what it looked like live – here are 10 more films to check out. (I’m not counting the two movies in which Dylan acted, director Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid or the unavailable Hearts of Fire, or the two projects he directed, both of which are commercially unavailable.)
It’s a substantial body of work that starts with two of the best movies ever made about pop music, I’m Not There and Don’t Look Back, and ends with what must be one of the weirdest. None of them really explain how or why Dylan did all he did, but they all make for fascinating viewing.
I’m Not There
Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is the film Dylan deserves – sometimes inaccessible but always original. It’s not a biopic in the normal sense of the term – onscreen text says it is “inspired by the music and the many lives of Bob Dylan.” The 2007 film tells the story of an artist who constantly reinvents himself through a series of different characters, including a downward-spiraling star of the ’60s, a folkie-turned-Born Again gospel musician, and an actor portraying that folkie. Cate Blanchett is especially compelling as the ’60s-era star, all speeded-up raw nerves. One of the best films ever made about pop music.
Don’t Look Back
Don’t Look Back is the rock-doc equivalent of the Beatles’ appearances on “The Ed Sullivan show” – an early master-class on How to Be a Rock Star. D.A. Pennebaker’s observational documentary shows Dylan onstage and off during his 1965 tour of the U.K. – flipping cue cards of lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” holding court in his room at London’s Savoy Hotel, and embarrassing press conference journalists. Dylan oozes charisma and contempt for the starmaking machine – which, purposefully or not, helped establish his public persona. The box set includes 65 Revisited, a collection of film outtakes and performances that’s also pretty great.
Rolling Thunder Revue
Dylan tried filmmaking, most famously with Renaldo and Clara, a fascinating mess of a movie about his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. (The film was so obsessed with archetypes that it could have been called “Forever Jung.”) Some of that footage was used in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a wonderfully weird part fictional meta-documentary that comes off as the movie Dylan might have made if he better understood the medium. Like Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, it may not be completely, 100% factual, but it feels deeply true.
No Direction Home
No Direction Home is the documentary version of A Complete Unknown – the story of how Dylan made a name for himself in, then turned his back on, the New York city folk scene. The interviews are revealing, the performance footage is compelling, and the intensity, shaped by Scorsese as director, is electric. It happened so fast: Dylan performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival just four-and-a-half years after his January 1961 arrival in New York, and just another year elapsed between then and the motorcycle accident that ends this part of his story.
Trouble No More
Going electric set Dylan apart from his folky contemporaries, but his most surprising move came in 1979, when the Jewish sixties icon embraced Jesus and became a born-again Christian. (My uncle, also Jewish, gave me a vinyl copy of every Dylan album until the gospel-oriented Slow Train Coming.) Trouble No More, an hour-long documentary included on a Dylan box set and now available to stream, explores the fan reactions, interspersed with sermons written by Lucy Santé and delivered by actor Michael Shannon. Dylan later returned to Judaism, but the concert footage remains powerful.
The Other Side of the Mirror
Dylan’s early career, and the plot of A Complete Unknown, pivots on his decision to “go electric” at the 1965 Newport folk festival. Documentarian Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror shows the four songs he performed there, plus Dylan’s workshop and concert performances in 1963 and 1964. Within two years, Dylan goes from performing news-driven broadsides like “Who Killed Davey Moore?” to playing expressionistic songs like “Chimes of Freedom” to waving goodbye to the folk scene with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Amazon Prime members can stream The Other Side of the Mirror online free here.
Shadow Kingdom
Dylan’s 2021 Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan might have been the best thing to come out of the pandemic. What was expected to be a streamed live performance turned out to be one of the most high-concept concert films since Stop Making Sense. It was shot in black and white, on a soundstage set up to look like the fictional “Bon Bon Club” in Marseille, and it features musicians Dylan doesn’t normally work with, playing arrangements of songs he rarely performs. It’s less a concert than a hazy, dreamlike vision of one – in a good way.
Bob Dylan: MTV Unplugged
First Dylan plugged in, then he unplugged again – first for two albums in the early 1990s, then for a 1994 episode of MTV’s live music franchise that came out the following year as an album and the video, Bob Dylan: MTV Unplugged. Although he performed everything on those two albums, he played this show with his live band at the time, with the addition of producer Brendan O’Brien on Hammond organ. In true Dylan fashion, some of it is brilliant, including “All Along the Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone;” and at least a bit of it is electric. Watch Dylan’s MTV Unplugged concert streaming free on Prime Video.
The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
In 1992, Dylan joined the Madison Square Garden tribute that was released as The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, where a variety of artists performed his songs. Some were great (Lou Reed, Willie Nelson), some were disappointing (Richie Havens), and not enough were unexpected. But the sheer star power here is hard to beat: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young and two members of Pearl Jam – plus Dylan himself. The songs are great, too.
Masked and Anonymous
“I wanted to make a Bob Dylan movie that was like a Bob Dylan song,” said screenwriter and director Larry Charles about Masked and Anonymous. One that was “ambiguous and hard to figure out, like a puzzle.” This movie, an oddball post-apocalyptic pop music comedy, stars Dylan as rock legend Jack Fate, sprung from prison to perform a benefit concert to save some future iteration of the U.S., is a few pieces short. It captures Dylan’s obsessions – shifts of identity, societal decay, the emptiness of celebrity – and fans will find it flawed but fascinating. Everyone else will just be confused.
English (US)