As I get older, it’s not often I’m able to say this, but I’m unable to comment about Bob Dylan the first time around, as I wasn’t born yet. I’m also unable to verify how accurate the film is in terms of historical adherence.
All that said, it’s a cracking good film. James Mangold is an assured master at the helm, not only producing some fine, considered works in the past (Cop Land, Girl Interrupted, Le Mans ’66) but also no stranger to excellent musician biopics with the Johnny Cash Oscar-winner, Walk The Line.
Here, he knows well enough to simply get out of the way of a stonking soundtrack and superlative, assured central performance by Timothee Chalomet. He must have been salivating, knowing as a filmmaker, he had those two pillars absolutely sewn up.
Credit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11563598/?ref_=mv_close
At a time when music seems to have lost most of its teeth, Dylan was the wind of change at a time of great tumult in American history, with the Civil Rights movement arriving at the same time as the advent of Rock n Roll.
It really helped that Dylan was not only a songwriter par excellence, but also just churning them out non-stop… on that creative burn where the tap is on and it’s all you can do to get them down on paper. No wonder he quickly became the voice of a generation, but with that came great frustration too.
I cannot imagine how that must’ve been. To be up against not only oneself, but ones peers, ones detractors and also the industry as a whole. At least after him there were superstars to study, to emulate in the ways of protecting yourself from the glare of the world. How on earth he successfully protected not just his sanity, but also his creative intent and push for his own truth, whatever the obstacles - and they were great - is humbling. “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
As the title suggests, the film charts the rise of this phenomenon from utter unknown to leaving everything and everyone in his wake, as his own brand of song swept like wildfire to clear all before it. With no one able to keep up, not his partners, his lovers, his peers, or the industry, it was evidently a lonely place to dwell.
His poetry, his ability to crystallise not just his own thoughts, but the happenings politically, unmatched to this day, Dylan remains the sole songsmith ever to have won a Nobel Peace Prize.
And Mangold casts the film exquisitely, Chalomet aided and abetted by some astute choices in the supporting roles, Elle Fanning coming back to spar opposite Chalomet again, after their recent but unremarkable Woody Allen NY collab, A Rainy Day In New York.
But there’s also Ed Norton, Monica Barbaro, Scoot McNairy and Boyd Holbrook - to name a few - all putting in great, well-measured depictions of real people, to round of a deeply pleasing film.
For my tastes, wildly successful as Chalomet is, he’s been grossly miscast on occasion, but not here. The role of a lifetime for him, delivered on a plate by a writer director fully in command.
Anatomy of a Flop 021
What I hadn’t known going in to Post was that it would be another year of my life gone before I emerged blinking into the sunlight complete with finished film. The difficulty you always run when making something low-budget is getting talent that can do the job: One of the key reasons I went to film school was to gain access to really talented crew who could do what they professed to be capable of.
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