I saw the film on the early years of Dylan’s career with my son at a cosy and posh hotel below Sea Containers House on the banks of the Thames on an early Sunday evening.
However you feel about Dylan, he is most certainly not the kind of guy you’d get to know by listening to the albums he produced in his early years. To begin with, he was allowed to release covers of previously released songs written by other people. When he started releasing his own material it was designed to meet the demands of the folk set , led by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and regulated by a cohort of “folkies”.
It wasn’t until the release of Bringing it all Back Home that we started hearing great music and America had to wait till late 1965 (Highway 61 revisited) and the following year’s Blonde on Blonde till we got music that could deliver something that did not sound written to meet an audience’s requirement for whingeing.
Those who go to watch this film to find out what the complete unknown actually was, will come away unsatisfied. Dylan never seems to understand himself and bullshits his audiences (especially Baez) with spurious nonsense about who he was and how he came to write what he did and play the way he did.
Those who come out of the biopic well are those who do not want to capture his heart. Woody Guthrie never says a thing , Seeger reminds me of the good hearted I know in London, Cash is the genius of the event. He and those who play electric with Dylan aren’t whingeing, they are matching the sounds coming out of rock and roll.
For me, the early years of Dylan show him to be a brilliant liar who gets his way with women, with financiers and with the critics while looking for something that satisfies him. He is beginning to in the final 20 minutes of the film.
But these early years show Dylan as a cynical user, for which I admire him. If we ignore the early albums we can spend time on what followed – 50 albums which are chronicled here (down to the tracks)
Dylan – still 40 years ago (Barcelona)
The main value of this film is in its production and in its refusal to show Dylan as anything other than the bastard he was in those days. I imagine he continues to be. He refused to pick up his Nobel prize for services to literature and has carried on challenging our notion of what he is until the present day.
Perhaps today’s biggest mystery is how he remains so alive. This biopic doesn’t tie him down and tells a small story that is 60 years old. It opens the door to anyone who has an interest of what came next. I have had many hours in his catalogue (thanks Spotify), I will return to the task of enriching myself, by spending more time with this lot.
