Bob Dylan is coming to the cinema. The film will be called “A Complete Unknown”. Dylanologists will already raise their fingers and explain: It is a quote from “Like a Rolling Stone”. The film’s release date is still up in the air, but there is already a trailer or teaser – film fans are divided on this – with Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. That fits. Men like Chalamet, who are rather petite and cute by nature, are now called “hot rodent men”, which is meant to be flattering. Dylan was already such a hot rodent 60 years ago.
Im Trailer or teaserLink will open in a new tab Chalamet has him walking through New York with his shoulders hunched like on old record covers. With tousled curls, he sings “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in a folk bar. You see the sunglasses-wearing Dylan who electrified his guitar, and the motorcycle-wearing Dylan who almost broke his neck to skip Woodstock.
Chalamet not only looks like Dylan, he sings like him too. Bravo. It’s a biopic. Director James Mangold made “Walk the Line” 20 years ago, a kind of prototype of the postmodern biopic. Joaquin Phoenix didn’t play Johnny Cash, he became Johnny Cash. After that, actors turned into stars like Freddie Mercury with an overbite prosthesis and actresses turned into tragic heroines like Amy Winehouse with a beehive wig. Until no one could tell where realism ended and satire began. Judging by the trailer or teaser, “A Complete Unknown” will not show Bob Dylan as a man-made myth, but as a cliché in the kitsch of the most carefully designed historical epic.
But Dylan has also been in the cinema, as an enigma and as an unknown. The film is called “I’m Not There” and he is 17 years old. Dylan has been played by Richard Gere and Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett; in total he has been six Dylans. You can’t get any closer to him than that.
