Cinemaths

When I was a teenager, I arrived home from a music festival with a paper copy of The Onion newspaper. I left it on the kitchen counter and went off to sleep the sleep of the dead. I came down the next morning to find my dad reading the page one story: DYLAN GOES ELECTRONICA. It had a photo of Dylan standing over a DJ kit like Tiesto. He read the whole thing as if he were reading an obituary. He sighed. He let me know it was a shame. He didn’t really even have the heart to discuss it much. I never told him. He’s still disappointed in Dylan. I’m a bad son.

Scorsese opens his 2005 documentary about Dylan with some insight into the intention of the song “Like a Rolling Stone”:

“I had ambitions to set out and find like an odyssey—going home, somewhere. I’m set out to find this home that I’d left awhile back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there and encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. […] I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be and so I’m on my way home.”

Mangold and company have taken this to heart. The mythical Dylan blows in from some place unknown, into New York and the folk scene and the film itself. Like the quote he’s in a state of permanent transience—always evolving, without any sentiment towards what’s been. He never did go electronica though.

This is one of the most warmly Hollywood films I’ve seen in 2024. It grabs on and effortlessly holds your interest. It’s doesn’t challenge you, nor does it challenge conceptions of Dylan. Sure, the technical work and acting is top notch, but what makes it compelling is the story it tells and the rhythm with which it tells it.

Thematically, the most interesting idea that they play with is that of creative jealousy. Baez looks on at Dylan wishing that she were able to write songs the way he is. She breaks up with him when she realizes she doesn’t want to date him, she wants to be him. This idea isn’t explored to any more depth than that, but that’s fine. It wouldn’t be appropriate to in a film depicting an actual person like Baez, but it would be neat to see a fictional depiction of that scenario somewhere.

This was the best of the post-Bohemian Rhapsody music biopics. Too bad it would be usurped by a monkey only days later…’