No./3 Why Hollywood won’t stop knockin’ on Dylan’s door
Two major new movies signal that the pioneering folk musician is bigger than ever
HOW MANY FILMS must Hollywood make about Bob Dylan before they can call it a day? The answer is: quite a few. In the pipeline we have James Mangold’s Timothée Chalamet-led biopic Going Electric, which is currently in development while the director and star complete other projects. And a recently announced adaptation of stage musical Girl From The North Country, inspired by Dylan’s back catalogue, has now entered the mix. Featuring big-hitter songs such as ‘Jokerman’ and ‘Forever Young’, the film will star musician Chlöe Bailey (sister of The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey), Woody Harrelson, and Olivia Colman, and follows a group of travellers during the Great Depression. Dylan may not be the most mainstream of musicians, but Hollywood keeps coming back to him, whether he’s being played by an erratic Cate Blanchett in 2007’s I’m Not There or documented by Martin Scorsese in 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.
“Despite his great importance he’s not as big as Adele or The Rolling Stones,” says Howard Sounes, author of Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan. “He’s not really mass entertainment; he’s niche, he’s quite serious, he appeals to a certain type of person.” Sounes believes his unusualness is one reason for Dylan’s timelessness. Chalamet and Bailey’s involvement in the new films opens up the star’s story and songs to a new, younger generation of moviegoers, who the author believes can still relate to Dylan’s outsider status: “I think they would admire his independence and his integrity and his intellectual depth.”
Chalamet has been preparing for the role extensively, visiting Dylan’s former homes in New York City, renting a house in Woodstock and meeting with Joel Coen to discuss the 1960s folk scene explored throughout Inside Llewyn Davis. The musician may be in his eighties, but it seems his legacy still strikes a chord with his admirers, even of the A-list variety. “He introduced poetic lyrics to rock music, which hadn’t really happened before,” says Sounes. “That changed popular music to this day.” As far as Hollywood’s concerned, you don’t need to be a Rolling Stone when you wrote ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.