05.23.11 | Gary Cahall | Staff NotesPrint this Post
"God, I'm glad I'm not me." -Cate Blanchett as Jude/Bob Dylan, I'm Not There (2007)
As if Baby Boomers needed another excuse for self-reflective musings on the inevitability of old age, May 24, 2011 is Bob Dylan's 70th birthday. Little needs to be said here about the music of the Minnesota-born singer/songwriter/poet/reluctant generational touchstone and its impact on popular culture over the last half-century or so...which is good, because writing about music is not my forte. No, this is a blog about cinema, and when it comes to the silver screen, the former Robert Allen Zimmerman's work has led to some rather bizarre and idiosyncratic moviegoing memories...one or two of them actually involving Bob himself.
Now, sure, Dylan currently has more than 330 Soundtrack credits on the Internet Movie Database; his songs have been featured in such diverse pictures as Coming Home, Natural Born Killers, Jerry Maguire, Walk the Line, and Watchmen; he's performed in such acclaimed documentary/concert films as Dont Look Back, The Concert for Bangladesh and The Last Waltz; and he even won an 2000 Academy Award for "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys. When it comes to acting, however...well, let's just say that the critics and audiences have not been quite as accepting.
From his twitchy supporting turn as knife-happy shop clerk Alias in Sam Peckinpah's studio-sabotaged 1973 western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (to which Bob contributed music to the soundtrack, including the song "Knocking on Heaven's Door"), to the failed 1987 backstage drama Hearts of Fire (in which musician Dylan mentored a young singer played by '80s pop footnote Fiona), to his semi-comatose star role 30 years later as jailed rock icon Jack Fate in 2003's musical/satire Masked and Anonymous, Dylan has shown on more than one occasion that, as far as actors go, he's a very good musician. The following are a few other choice Dylanesque screen moments, some just as odd and all but one minus the actual Bob:
Renaldo and Clara (1978) - Yes, Dylan is the star (as well as director and, with playwright Sam Shepard, co-writer) of this infamous, four-hour-long mix of "life on the road" melodrama and concert documentary, filmed during the legendary '75-'76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. However, he and then-wife Sara play the title roles of the married musicians in the movie's often ad-libbed fictional sequences, so it was up to rockabilly innovator Ronnie Hawkins--who looked nothing like Dylan and outweighed him by a good 100 pounds--to portray Bob in these scenes, with Nashville actress Ronee Blakley as Sara. Likewise, the scenes with Dylan performing on stage generally feature him masked or in clown-like whiteface. The reasons for these moves, much like everything else about Renaldo and Clara, have pretty much been lost in the sands of time, because after its disastrous initial theatrical run and scathing reviews, Bob withdrew the original film (a two-hour cut did only slightly better). To date it has not been released in any home video format, although there have been occasional rep cinema or museum screenings.
The Wanderers (1979) - The other "gang movie" of '79 to earn a cult following (alongside The Warriors), Philip Kaufman's affectionate paean to New York street life in the early 1960s follows the changes in American society as seen through the eyes of the members of an Italian-American gang in the Bronx. A key point of this change is depicted towards the end of the film--and of the doomed romance between head Wanderer Richie (Ken Wahl) and free-spirited Nina (Karen Allen)--when Richie follows her down to a Greenwich Village club. Looking through the window but afraid to enter, he watches as Nina chats with her bohemian friends and a certain curly-haired young folk singer croons "The Times They Are a-Changin'."
Get Crazy (1983) - It made few waves when it was released and, sadly, has yet to come out on DVD, but this slapstick look at a threatened-with-demolition rock palace's all-star New Year's Eve concert (based on director Allan Arkush's own experiences working the Fillmore East in the late '60s) has earned a small but devoted group of fans, yours truly among them. Malcolm McDowell threatens to steal the show as a drugged-out, codpiece-stuffing Mick Jagger take-off named Reggie Wanker, but just as good in his own low-key fashion is proto-punk pioneer Lou Reed as "metaphysical folk singer, invent[or of] the '70s, anti-social recluse" Auden, clearly patterned after Dylan, whose cobweb-strewn apartment is a match for the cover of Bob's 1965 Bringing It All Back Home album, as seen in the above clip.
The Freshman (1990) - What the appeal of covering Dylan songs has to a certain generation of TV stars the world may never know, but everyone from Eddie Albert to Sebastian Cabot to William Shatner has taken a crack at it, often with unintentionally hilarious results. One of the loopiest renditions that ever made it to the big screen came courtesy of writer/director Andrew Bergman's Godfather-flavored spoof starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick, as the guests at a $350,000-per-plate dinner of endangered species are treated to former Miss America emcee Bert Parks--as himself--performing "Maggie's Farm." And you know what? Bert's not half-bad.
Bob Roberts (1992) - Dylan's first song to crack the Top 40, 1965's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" influenced such subsequent artists as Elvis Costello ("Pump It Up") and R.E.M. ("It's the End of the World As We Know It"), and the Dont Look Back promo short the singer and filmmaker D.A. Pennebacker created for it, with Bob standing in an alley behind London's Savoy Hotel, is recognized as a precursor of the modern music video. So it made perfect sense for director/star Tim Robbins, as folk-singing, conservative senatorial candidate Roberts, to put his own spin on the original imagery with his video for "Wall Street Rap," the lyrics of which include "Julie's selling T-bonds, her bill is turning over, John is building malls, manipulating a takeover." Among Roberts' other tunes featured in the film are "The Times They Are a-Changin' Back" and his right-wing rendition of "This Land Is Your Land," titled simply "My Land."
Factory Girl (2006) - The exact nature of the relationship between Dylan and socialite/Andy Warhol "superstar"/drug casualty Edie Sedgwick, who met the singer while both were staying at New York's Chelsea Hotel in the mid-'60s, may still be a little vague (it was Warhol who informed Edie that the singer had gotten married). But when the creators of this Sedgwick biopic were threatened with a defamation lawsuit by Dylan's people if they went ahead and suggested that his actions towards her led to her eventual 1971 death, they decided that the character Hayden Christensen plays while romancing Edie (Sienna Miller) would be a "composite role" known as "Billy Quinn" (a not-too-subtle reference to Dylan's "Quinn the Eskimo"? ) or simply "The Musician."
I'm Not There (2007) - With all of the various personae (folk troubadour, rock star, film actor, born-again Christian, etc.) that make up Dylan's public face, it's perhaps not so surprising that maverick filmmaker Todd Haynes would opt to show this in his surreal biographical homage by having five different actors--and one actress!--play his different aspects, even though none of them are refered to as "Bob Dylan." A young black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who plays guitar and calls himself Woody Guthrie; an interview subject (Ben Whishaw) named after poet Arthur Rimbaud; an angry folk singer (Christian Bale) and the Hollywood actor (Heath Ledger) playing him in a film-within-a-film; embittered superstar Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett, in an Oscar-nominated performance); the outlaw Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), in what may have been a salute to the real Dylan's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid performance; and an evangelical preacher (Ledger again, perhaps as his earlier actor later in life): Haynes takes these characters and intercuts their stories within each other, all to a soundtrack of Dylan's greatest hits. The result is a confusing and at times overwhelming hodgepodge of thoughts and perceptions...which may well be what it's like to sit down and chat with Bob himself.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) - There's scarcely a musical genre of the last 50 years that movie comedy juggernaut Judd Apatow--who produced and co-wrote with director Jake Kasdan--fails to lampoon in this spoof that goes beyond being just a Walk the Line parody, thanks in large part to the wonderfully wacky starring turn by John C. Reilly as the dim-witted, smell-deprived Cox. Along with encounters with Elvis Presley and The Beatles and inadvertently creating punk rock, Dewey also tries his hand at crafting poetic protest songs in the style of Bob Dylan, the results of which can be seen above (and yes, Reilly did play guitar on most of the film's soundtrack). "This song is very deep," indeed.
