Does the world really need a big Bob Dylan biopic? The Nobel-Prize-winning singer-songwriter has always seemed too aloof, too esoteric, for the Walk the Line treatment. There’s a reason that the most prominent effort to date, 2007’s I’m Not There, employed a fiercely experimental approach, casting six different actors as Bob and refusing to mention him by name. But the times, they have a-changed, and now we’re just weeks away from a glossy new Dylan biopic, starring waifish Dune heartthrob Timothée Chalamet. The film, titled A Complete Unknown, has been tipped for next year’s Oscars – but few people seem as excited as the man himself.
Wafting away his usual fog of mystique for a moment, Dylan this week shared his enthusiasm for A Complete Unknownon X/Twitter. “There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!),” he wrote. “Timothée Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.” (Despite the whiff of publicist-speak, it was seemingly composed by Dylan personally – a source close to the singer confirmed as much in a recent Wall Street Journal article scrutinising Dylan’s social media habits.) The endorsement, however, may not be the blessing from on high you might assume. Just because a biopic gets the approval of its subject doesn’t mean it’s actually going to be any good. Often, it’s quite the opposite.
Recent years have seen a spate of artist-endorsed biopics make their way onto cinemas – the Elton John musical Rocketman, NWA drama Straight Outta Compton, or Joan Jett bio The Runaways, to name but a few. Now, the dam is well and truly bursting: in the next few years, we’re set to get films about The Beatles (a sprawling quadrilogy from Skyfall’s Sam Mendes), Bruce Springsteen (starring The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White), and a Ridley Scott-directed Bee Gees biopic (with surviving band member Barry Gibb serving as exec producer), among many, many others. Great art, however, requires truth, and the truth is often uncomfortable. If a film sets out to appease its own protagonist, then something has gone seriously awry. All too often it results in films that are over-sanitised and caged by formula.
Sometimes, if a musician has died, surviving family or bandmates will lend their backing instead, – leading to queasy situations such as the Queen-endorsed Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, or this year’s Amy Winehouse movie Back to Black. Both of these films adopted a sanitised approach to the living figures (Mercury’s bandmates and Winehouse’s father Mitch, respectively), while reducing their subjects to a kind of problematic caricature.
These were particularly execrable examples of music biopics, but by no means outliers. It isn’t hard to spot the DNA they share with, say, Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line – all films that take complicated, expansive figures and contort them to fit a too-slick rise-and-fall narrative. Both Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody won major awards – including Oscars for Best Actress and Best Actor respectively. Walk the Line, though, is a vastly superior film, a hit that more or less set the formula for the genre. (Even a brutal lampooning in 2007’s parody Walk Hard is unable to dull the potency of the central pairing, an utterly electric Joaquin Phoenix and Reece Witherspoon.) Bohemian Rhapsody traces the same contours but more sloppily – it’s one of a long line of increasingly insipid copycats.
The modern influx of these sorts of films has, however, led to experimentation on the fringes. Parodic hitmaker “Weird Al” Yankovic co-wrote his own mock biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story in 2022, an admirably offbeat comedy that featured a jungle shootout with Pablo Escobar, and ended with Yankovic being assassinated onstage by a hitman hired by Madonna. Pharrell Williams produced his own biopic Piece by Piece, which was staged entirely using computer-generated Lego. Robbie Williams, meanwhile, is depicted as an ape for the entirety of his – apparently very good – forthcoming biopic Better Man. It’s not that good – or at least interesting – biopics can’t be made with the support of their subjects, but these instances are the exceptions.
Consider, briefly, the case of Jake LaMotta, the boxer who inspired Martin Scorsese’s classic 1980 biopic Raging Bull. LaMotta helped train star Robert DeNiro for the film, only to say upon watching it that he “didn’t particularly like [it]”. He was, he said, shocked at the unsparing light he was portrayed in – but it made him confront some hard facts about his life. “For the first time I thought, my God, was I beating up my brother and doing all that kinda stuff?” he recalled.
A biopic need not send its subject spiralling into epiphany, of course – but it should be willing to go where the story leads, however uncomfortable that may be. Chalamet said he was “floored” by Dylan’s praise – and who could blame him? It’s a special thing to be complimented by a hero. But would he have been better off if Dylan had castigated him instead? The answer to that is blowing in the wind…
‘A Complete Unknown’ is released in the UK on 17 January 2025