141 min | R | December 25, 2024 | Searchlight Pictures
Timothee Chalamet becomes Bob Dylan in a biopic that covers 1961 to 1965. He sings live. He plays live. James Mangold makes the rare music biopic that trusts the music.
A nineteen-year-old kid arrives in New York City in the winter of 1961 with a guitar and a harmonica and a voice that sounds like gravel and prophecy. He calls himself Bob Dylan. He visits Woody Guthrie in the hospital. He plays folk clubs in Greenwich Village. He writes songs that change everything. James Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks adapt the story of Dylan’s early career from his arrival in New York through his electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. The film covers four years in which a folk singer became a rock star and a movement felt betrayed by its own prophet. Mangold structures the film as a rise narrative that culminates not in triumph but in rupture.
Timothee Chalamet plays Dylan with a physical transformation that goes beyond imitation. He captures the slouch and the mumble and the way Dylan held his guitar and the way he looked at people as if he was already somewhere else. Chalamet sings and plays live and the commitment shows. The vocal performance finds the nasal precision and the rhythmic phrasing that made Dylan’s voice unmistakable. Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger with a warmth and idealism that makes Seeger’s eventual heartbreak at Newport devastating. Norton plays a true believer watching the thing he believes in change into something he does not recognize. Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez with a vocal talent that matches Chalamet’s and a sharpness that the role requires. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a composite character based on Suze Rotolo, with a quiet strength.
Mangold directed Walk the Line and understands how to make music biopics work. The performance sequences are shot with intimate camera work that puts the audience in the folk clubs and on the festival stages. The cinematography by Phedon Papamichael recreates early 1960s New York with a grain and warmth that feels period-authentic. The production design fills Greenwich Village apartments and club stages with lived-in detail. The sound design is the film’s technical triumph. The live performances are mixed to feel like live performances. The room acoustics change. The audience noise shifts. The music breathes. Mangold resists the temptation to over-produce the sound and the restraint pays off in every scene.
The film’s limitation is the limitation of every biopic about a genius who resists explanation. Dylan is unknowable. That is the point of Dylan. Chalamet plays the unknowability well but the film must still construct a narrative around a person who refused narrative. The Newport sequence is the climax and it is electrifying. Dylan plugs in. The crowd roars with confusion and anger. Seeger watches from backstage. The moment works because Mangold has spent two hours building to it with patience and because the music is genuinely powerful. Dylan went electric not because he wanted to betray folk music but because he had outgrown it. The film understands that growth and loss are the same thing.