
Run time: 140 mins
James Mangold’s biopic follows the rise of Bob Dylan, with Timothée Chalamet brilliantly embodying his shapeshifting allure.
The film takes a reverent stance to Dylan’s artistry, populated by technically accomplished musical performances, and shot with a real sensitivity to the emotional landscape of each track. It opens with the musician’s arrival in New York City in 1961, a naive enthusiast searching out his heroes, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). It ends with the moment he bid them farewell, creatively, by performing with electric instruments, thus stretching his hand out to the rock scene, at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival.
Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, whose country stylings and assured stage power is a spur to Dylan. Dylan is torn between his sweet girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) – a real person renamed here, touchingly, to her privacy – and folk musician Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), herself evidently touched by genius.
Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise in Walk the Line, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. And Chalamet is brilliant.