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Timothée Chalamet is on a motorcycle ride straight to an Academy Award nomination for his performance of Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The movie follows the 19-year-old mysterious Minnesotan in 1961 as he ditches the name Robert Zimmerman to create his own myth, concluding with him “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. While the picture may not get all the facts down, it nicely captures the essence of the man and the spirit of the times.
The movie’s toe-tapping big finish may have you shouting “encore!” at the multiplex, but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Luckily, a legend like Dylan has a large footprint on streaming video, so you can keep the party going as soon as you get back from the theater. Here are a few titles we recommend.
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Dont Look Back (1967), dir. D.A. Pennebaker
Dont Look Back (no apostrophe for some reason!) is a major milestone in 20th century cinema. Even though Dylan later rejected it, calling it “propaganda,” this is one of the earliest “fly on the wall”-type documentaries, making use of lightweight cameras and portable tape recorders. It follows Dylan and Joan Baez on their British tour right before the big “electric” concert at Newport in 1965. While the performance footage is great, the real win is watching Dylan joust with the press, then hanging out with him backstage and in hotel rooms—shooting the breeze, chain smoking, banging on typewriters and basically looking cool. Most famous is a party that gets a little rowdy (someone throws a glass from the window, which turns into a whole thing) then Dylan absolutely ethering “The British Dylan,” Donovan, during a “guitar pull” session. And yes, that proto-rock video of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes from here.
Of note: a similar documentary was shot the following year, which Dylan assembled himself, called Eat the Document. It features Dylan “plugged in” with The Hawks (later The Band), causing great consternation for folk purists. I can not officially recommend this, as it has never officially been released but, uh, if YouTune in to the right place you can find it.
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Festival! (1967), dir. Murray Lester
Before there was Woodstock or even Monterey Pop, there was Festival!. (Well, before that there was Jazz on a Summer’s Day, but let’s not get too picky.) Murray Lerner’s documentary covered the 1963, 1964 and 1965 Newport Folk Festivals, so that includes the famous “electric” set that serves as the climax for A Complete Unknown. But there’s a lot else in there (including the earlier moment when Dylan asks for a harmonica and people start chucking some at him.) This is a great overview of the folk revivalism scene that Ed Norton’s version of Pete Seeger talks about in the new movie—a sunnier, summer parallel to the harshness shown in the Coen Brothers’s Inside Llewyn Davis. Also, in addition to folkies like Judy Collins, Richard and Mimi Fariña and Peter, Paul and Mary, you can see the reverence the younger generation had for older blues artists like Son House, Howlin’ Wolf and Mississippi John Hurt.
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Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1971), dir. Sam Peckinpah
A Complete Unknown shows how Bob Dylan transformed from an activist folk singer to a rock ‘n’ roll legend. By 1971, after a rough motorcycle crash, he had changed yet again into an ambassador for “the old, weird American,” recording albums like John Wesley Harding and Self Portrait evoking outlaw figures and the Old West. Nashville Skyline was a hit on the country charts! When Sam Peckinpah cast Kris Kirstofferson as Billy the Kid, the actor-musician suggested getting Dylan involved for the music (which gave us the song “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”), and this led to Dylan appearing in a third-billed supporting role. Dylan doesn’t speak much in the fatalist, end-of-an-era picture, but he gets a lot of reaction shots, wears several different cowboy hats, gets to chase a wild turkey and even kills someone by throwing a knife at his throat.
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The Last Waltz (1978), dir. Martin Scorsese
It might be the best concert movie ever made, and a lot of that is because of its big ending: Bob Dylan, back with The Band. Dylan had already appeared in the collaborative concert film of The Concert for Bangladesh a few years earlier (finally available to watch legally again after many years in limbo) but The Last Waltz really has that magic pixie dust. In addition to The Band there are killer performances by Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, the Staples Singers, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and plenty more. What’s funny is that right before hitting the stage Dylan wanted the cameras turned off; he was going to play for the crowd at the Winterland Ballroom only. Promoter Bill Graham basically had to get on his knees—and past Dylan’s then tour manager, noted fishmonger Lou Kemp—to beg him to reconsider, as the distribution deal for the movie was predicated on Dylan’s involvement. (It all worked out.) The issue was that Dylan had his own movie in the works, Renaldo and Clara, which you’ll note is not on this list. Keep reading to learn why!
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Band of the Hand (1986), dir. Paul Michael Glaser
The ’80s were tough for Dylan. He writes about it in his memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, or maybe you saw him struggling in the recent Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop. He tried touring with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and also the Grateful Dead in an effort to get his mojo back. (It took collaborating with Daniel Lanois for Oh, Mercy at the end of the decade to make it happen.) He also got involved with some film projects. Richard Marquand’s Hearts of Fire, co-starring Rupert Everett and Fiona, is fascinating but awful—only for the true heads. You can also catch a cameo of Dylan as a welder in a weird movie called Catchfire, directed and disowned by Dennis Hopper. There is, however, a bright spot. Band of the Hand is a strange, sleazy low budget crime picture about bad kids going straight directed by Paul Michael Glaser under the wing of producer Michael Mann. It has a stacked cast (Laurence Fishburne, John Cameron Mitchell, Stephen Lang, Lauren Holly and James Remar) and Dylan wrote the opening tune. This raucous, scuzzy rocker (called “Band of the Hand”) plays over and over again in the film, almost like a Greek chorus. I can’t call this movie a masterpiece, but it is entertaining.
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Masked and Anonymous (2003), dir. Larry Charles
Directed by Borat and Seinfeld alum Larry Charles (and co-written by Dylan himself), Masked and Anonymous, set in a slightly dystopian (or at least exaggerated) near future, has a real “student film” quality, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. The plot, such as it is, features Dylan as “Jack Fate,” an imprisoned rock star tasked with putting on a show that will redeem mankind. John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Cheech Marin and a long list of other awesome people pop up. It’s definitely a midnight movie, and not everything works, but it also has some great musical moments, like the clip of “Cold Irons Bound” shown above.
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I’m Not There (2007), dir. Todd Haynes
A Complete Unknown isn’t the first Bob Dylan biopic put to screen. In a way, it’s the seventh, because Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There features six different sides of Bob Dylan chopped up into one kaleidoscopic movie. Coming into this one already a fan of the lore certainly will help you get the references, but even without that it’s hard not to dig Cate Blanchett’s version of Bob in his Dont Look Now era. Dylan didn’t have anything to do with this production, but he gave Haynes his blessing when he learned it would be such a metatextual enterprise.
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Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019), dir. Martin Scorsese
In 1975 Bob Dylan hit the road with a group of other performers for a wild show called “The Rolling Thunder Revue.” He brought with him playwright Sam Shephard and a film crew with the idea of concocting a grand American epic intercut with concert footage. That film, Renaldo and Clara, is a near four-hour experiment that even a huge Dylan fan such as I will tell you is a struggle to sit through. It isn’t legally available, though bootlegs of different edits can be found. However, you don’t need to do that. Martin Scorsese strip-mined all the best parts and put it in this freewheelin’ Netflix doc that tells the Rolling Thunder story, but also leaves plenty of room to make stuff up. Reading Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s book On the Road with Bob Dylan is the best way to find out what really happened on the ‘75 tour, but this movie is a lot of fun, too.
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Shadow Kingdom (2021), dir. Alma Har’el
Bob Dylan, age 83, spends a large part of his time right now on the road. (For years his touring project was just called “The Never Ending Tour.”) That hit a hiccup during the coronavirus pandemic, so he decided to put on what was essentially a pay-per-view event, now streamable, called Shadow Kingdom, in which he sang a lot of his old songs. Directed by Alma Har’el (and shot by The Brutalist’s DP Lol Crawley), there’s an eerie, Twin Peaks-like vibe to this production. There are plenty of Dylan concert videos you can hunt down—Bob Dylan: MTV Unplugged from the mid-1990s is a great one—but Shadow Kingdom has a strange “dispatch from out of time” quality that captures the uncertainty of those COVID days. Luckily, this was not Dylan’s last performance, as he hit the road hard again once conditions allowed it.
where to stream shadow kingdom
Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets at @JHoffman about Phish and Star Trek.
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