On Dylan

 

Bob Dylan is so inherently unclassifiable that, when the great filmmaker Todd Haynes made a purposefully disjointed and elliptical film about the songwriter, he had to cast six actors to play Dylan, including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and an 11-year-old.

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There would seem to be no greater fool’s errand than to try to plug Dylan into a conventional or pop star biopic, the sort of straightforward narrative that in recent years has won Oscar nominations for Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. There is nothing normal about Bob Dylan; how could you possibly make a normal movie about him? He is so unknowable that he has been mistaken for a vagrant by four generations in a row now.

-Will Leith in the WaPost