Your support helps us tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to big tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the finances of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word,’ which shines a light on American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know the importance of analyzing the facts of messaging. .
At such a critical moment in American history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to continue sending journalists to tell both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to block Americans from our reporting and analysis with a paywall. We believe that quality journalism should be available to everyone, and paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes a difference.
Does the world really need a big one Bob Dylan biopic? The Nobel Prize winning singer and songwriter has always seemed too withdrawn, too esoteric for Walk the line treatment. There’s a reason why the most prominent effort so far was in 2007 I’m not therehe used a fiercely experimental approach, casting six different actors as Bob and refusing to mention him by name. But times have changed, and now we’re just weeks away from a a great new Dylan biopicstarring Waifish Dune heartthrob Timothée Chalamet. The movie called Completely unknownhas been announced for next year’s Oscars – but few people seem as excited as the man himself.
Ditching his usual fog of mystique for a moment, Dylan this week shared his enthusiasm for Completely unknownon X/Twitter. “It’s called a movie about my opening coming soon Completely unknown (what a title!),” he wrote. “Timothee Chalamet plays the lead role. Timmy is a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’ll be as completely believable as I am. Or the younger me. Or some other me.” (Despite the whiff of publicist talk, it appears to have been composed by Dylan himself – a source close to the singer confirmed in a recent The Wall Street Journal article exploring Dylan’s social media habits.) However, the support may not be the blessing from above that you might assume. Just because a biopic gets the approval of its subject doesn’t mean it’s actually going to be good. Often it is quite the opposite.
In recent years, a number of artist-backed biopics have hit theaters – the Elton John musical RocketmanNWA drama Straight Outta Comptonor a biography of Joan Jett The Runawaysto name just a few. Now, the dam is well and truly bursting: in the next few years we’re about to get films about The Beatles (the great quadrilogy from Heavy rain‘s Sam Mendes), Bruce Springsteen (Ch Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White), and the Ridley Scott-directed Bee Gees biopic (with surviving band member Barry Gibb as executive producer), among many, many others. Great art, however, requires truth, and truth is often uncomfortable. If the film wants to placate its own protagonist, then something has gone seriously wrong. All too often this results in films that are overly sanitized and sealed with formula.
Sometimes, if a musician has died, surviving family or bandmates will lend their support instead, leading to awkward situations such as the Queen-backed Freddie Mercury biopic. Bohemian Rhapsodyor this year’s Amy Winehouse movie Back to black. Both of these films adopted a sanitized approach to living figures (Mercury’s bandmates and Winehouse’s father Mitch, respectively) while reducing their subjects to a kind of troubled caricature.
These were particularly lousy examples of musical biopics, but by no means outstanding. It’s not hard to see the DNA they share with, say, a Johnny Cash biopic Walk the line – all movies that take complicated, expansive figures and twist them to fit into a too-smooth rise-and-fall story. Both Walk the line and Bohemian Rhapsody won major awards – including Oscars for Best Actress and Best Actor. Walk the linehowever, is a vastly superior film, a hit that more or less set the formula for the genre. (Even brutally mocked in the 2007 parody Walk Hard unable to blunt the power of the central pairing, the utterly electric Joaquin Phoenix and Reece Witherspoon.) Bohemian Rhapsody it traces the same contours, but more sloppily – it is one of a long line of increasingly mindless copies.
However, the modern influx of such films has led to experimentation on the fringes. Parody hitmaker “Weird Al” Yankovic is co-writing his own fake biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story In 2022, a highly unusual comedy that featured a shootout in the jungle with Pablo Escobar, and ended with Yankovic being killed on stage by an assassin hired by Madonna. Pharrell Williams has produced his own biopic Piece by piecewhich is entirely executed using computer-generated Lego. Robbie Williams, meanwhile, has been cast as a monkey for the entirety of his – apparently very good – upcoming biopic Better Man. Not so good – or at least interesting – biographical films I can’t be made with the support of their subjects, but these cases are 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 after watching it that he “didn’t particularly like it [it]”. He was, he said, shocked by the unsparing light in which he was portrayed – but it forced him to face some hard facts about his life. “For the first time I thought, God, did I beat my brother and do all these things?” he recalled.
A biopic, of course, doesn’t have to spiral its subject—but it should be willing to go where the story leads, however uncomfortable that may be. Chalamet he said he was “overwhelmed” by Dylan’s praise – and who could blame him? It’s a special thing to get a compliment from a hero. But would he have been better off if Dylan had hung him? The answer to that is blowing in the wind…
‘A Complete Unknown’ is released in the UK on 17 January 2025