The second movie in my Christmas movie marathon with Deb… I felt like I knew the basics of Bob Dylan’s story. I remembered an early SNL skit making fun of the time he spent at Woody Guthrie’s hospital bedside hoping that it would boost his folk-music credibility, I knew that he got booed at the Newport Folk Festival when he went “electric,” and I knew that he’d always been enigmatic about his background and upbringing. The movie did a great job easing one into the New York folk scene of the early 1960s and Dylan’s singular drive to make music. The idea that one could just show up in town with a guitar and a notebook and eventually eclipsed the whole folk world is almost impossible to imagine. I appreciate that the movie didn’t seem to shy away from showing that Dylan could be, in the words of Joan Baez, a bit of an asshole. There was one thing that didn’t show up in this bio-pic that I found interesting. 

The relationship between musicians and alcohol seemed to be on full display and there certainly wasn’t a single moment when someone wasn’t lighting up a cigarette. What I found interesting was that pot didn’t seem to exist in this world. And now that I think about it, there were no drugs at all present during this whole movie. I guess I’ll have to watch it a second time to see if any reference is made to drugs of any kind. The blues musician who showed up to Pete Seeger’s PBS-TV show drinking from a bottle (of whiskey?) on the air and Johnny Cash’s inebriated attempt to move his parked car were “interesting.” But the absence of pot caused me to a bit of pause. That’s because one other factoids that I had remembered was something Peter Brown, the Beatles’ publicist, had written, I think in his book, The Love You Make, that while the Beatles had a history of using amphetamines and of course, alcohol, since the Hamburg days, it wasn’t until one of the early US tours that they were introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan. On a side note, given the prolific writing career of Dylan and the Beatles, it does make me wonder about the possible relationship between having a strong drive to make/write music and the use of pot… Just a thought. Anyway, pot seems to be absent from this version of history.

Speaking of history, I loved that the actors decided to sing and play their characters’ songs, especially the actress, Monica Barbaro, who played Joan Baez, AND that they did such a believable job doing it. As a guitar player, I hate when movie makers, doing a movie about musicians, try to “fake play” their instruments. There was a Woody Allen movie, Sweet and Lowdown (1999), about a jazz guitar player, played by Sean Penn, and they actually zoom into this finger work and he clearly was not playing the chords or notes that we’re hearing on the soundtrack. Except for Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger on the banjo, everyone seems to be playing the chords and the songs that we’re hearing and that makes my musician’s heart happy. 

I loved how the story played out and how all of the characters seemed to be fully fleshed out and their motivations understandable without resorting to stereotypes and paper-thin villains. At the same time, I sometimes wonder how much freedom we should give to the storytellers to craft their version of the story without having to be a slave to the actual history of the events portrayed in the film. I mean, this isn’t journalism or even a documentary (which isn’t bound by academic history standards). I’m just glad that there wasn’t some (fictional) evil person behind the scenes that provided our hero his opportunity to overcome some near tragic dilemma, that is often used in musician bio-pics, like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody. It was a portrayal of imperfect people doing amazing things and creating incredible music. Enjoy.

[Movie viewed on 2024-12-25 at Regal Red Rocks]

Bonus Behind the Scene featurette:

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Tags: 2024 movies, bob Dylan, Christmas movies, movie review, music bio-pic

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