Music biographies face a lot of challenges. Some can be dealt with, like combining and changing events and people to make the story flow, but there are two nearly insurmountable problems that this movie, even with great performances, does not overcome.
Big Problem One: Music rights versus truth. You can’t make a music biopic without the music (though people have tried), and you can’t get music rights from an artist or his estate if you’re going to show anything they don’t want shown. So Dylan here does some not-great stuff, like being unreasonable onstage and having an affair with Joan Baez when his girlfriend is out of the country, but he never uses any illegal drugs. Actually, I don’t think anyone in this entire movie about musicians in the sixties is even shown smoking pot.
Big Problem Two (the bigger problem): Walk Hard. John C. Reilly’s 2007 fake music bio’s story of Dewey Cox accurately and effectively mocked every beat of a conventional music biopic that it’s impossible to watch a real one without comparing it to the equivalent scene in Walk Hard. Alamo Drafthouse made it even harder by playing the Bob Dylan parody scene from Walk Hard before the movie.
Here’s the thing: if you can somehow shut those issues out of your mind while you watch, there are some really strong performances. Chalamet’s Dylan performance and voice (both talking and singing) is great. Edward Norton seems like a cartoon version of Pete Seeger, except if you’ve seen the real guy and realize it’s spot on.
But someone needs to reinvent the music biopic. Do something crazy, like replace the artist with a CGI monkey. Nah, that’s dumb.