DOes the world Really Need a big Bob Dylan biopic? The Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter has always seemed too distant, too esoteric Walk along the line Treatment. There’s a reason the most significant achievement to date occurred in 2007 I’m not theretook a highly experimental approach, casting six different actors to play Bob and refusing to mention him by name. But times have changed, and now we’re just weeks away from a shiny new Dylan biopic with Waifish dune Heartthrob Timothée Chalamet. The film with the title A complete unknownHe’s been nominated for next year’s Oscars – but few people seem as excited as the man himself.

For a moment this week, Dylan dispelled his usual fog of mysticism and shared his enthusiasm for A complete unknownon X/Twitter. “There is a film about me coming soon A complete unknown (what a title!),” he wrote. “Timothée Chalamet plays the lead role. Timmy is a brilliant actor, so I’m sure he’ll be as believable as I am. Or a younger me. Or some other self.” (Despite the hint of journalistic language, it appears to have been composed by Dylan himself – a source close to the singer confirmed this in a recent interview Wall Street Journal (Article examining Dylan’s social media habits.) However, the endorsement may not be the blessing from above as you might think. Just because a biopic gets the approval of its subject doesn’t mean it will actually be any good. Often it is exactly the opposite.

In recent years, numerous biopics recommended by artists have been released in cinemas – for example the Elton John musical Rocket ManNWA drama Straight from Comptonor Joan Jett biography The outliersto name just a few. Now the dam is finally breaking: in the next few years we will be getting films about the Beatles (an extended quadrilogy of). Skyfall‘s Sam Mendes), Bruce Springsteen (with The bear‘s Jeremy Allen White) and a Ridley Scott-directed Bee Gees biopic (with surviving band member Barry Gibb serving as executive producer), among many, many others. However, great art requires truth, and truth is often uncomfortable. When a film tries to appease its own protagonist, something has gone seriously wrong. All too often this leads to films that are overly sanitized and boxed in by formula.

Sometimes when a musician has died, surviving family members or bandmates support them instead – leading to awkward situations like the Queen-endorsed Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsodyor this year’s Amy Winehouse film Back to black. Both films took a sanitized approach to the living characters (Mercury’s bandmates and Winehouse’s father Mitch, respectively) while reducing their subjects to a kind of problematic caricature.

These were particularly heinous examples of music biopics, but by no means outliers. It’s not hard to see the DNA they share with, say, the Johnny Cash biography Walk along the line – all films that take complicated, sprawling characters and twist them to fit an overly sophisticated story of rise and fall. Both Walk along the line And Bohemian Rhapsody won major awards – including Oscars for Best Actress. Walk along the lineis, however, a far superior film, a hit that more or less sets the formula for the genre. (Even a brutal taunt in the 2007 parody Go hard is unable to weaken the power of the central duo, an absolutely electrifying Joaquin Phoenix and Reece Witherspoon.) Bohemian Rhapsody traces the same contours, but more sloppily – it is one of a long line of increasingly bland imitators.

However, the modern influx of these types of films has led to experimentation on the fringes. Parodic hitmaker “Weird Al” Yankovic co-wrote his own pseudo-biopic Strange: The Al Yankovic Story in 2022, an admirably offbeat comedy that included a jungle shootout with Pablo Escobar and ended with Yankovic being murdered onstage by a hitman hired by Madonna. Pharrell Williams produced his own biopic piece by piecewhich was staged entirely with computer-generated Lego. Robbie Williams, on the other hand, is portrayed as a monkey in the entire – apparently very good – upcoming film biography Better man. It’s not that good – or at least it is interesting – Biographies tilt with the support of their subjects, but these cases are exceptions.

Let’s briefly consider the case of Jake LaMotta, the boxer who inspired Martin Scorsese’s classic 1980 biopic Angry 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 by the unsparing light in which he was portrayed – but it confronted him with some hard facts about his life. “For the first time I thought, ‘My God, did I beat up my brother and do all that?'” he recalled.

Of course, a biopic doesn’t have to send its subject into a spiral of revelation – but it should be willing to go wherever the story leads, however uncomfortable that may be. Chalamet said he was “overwhelmed” by Dylan’s praise – and who could blame him? There’s something special about receiving a compliment from 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 January 17, 2025