Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown

Dylan always identified with directors; he imagined his own life as a movie. Yet to appear in a movie would be to fix an identity, to admit that one was acting. Perhaps it was this conflict that denied him something like Mick Jagger's charmed résumé — collaborations with Kenneth Anger, documentaries by the likes of Peter Whitehead, the Maysles brothers, and Robert Frank, a career-defining performance in the cult film Performance. Jean-Luc Godard made a Rolling Stones rehearsal the centerpiece of One Plus One; Dylan had to make do with an inane dis in Masculine-Feminine: "Who are you, Mr. Bob Dylan?" Hey, how did Godard guess that the question of identity would haunt every movie (and every move) that Mr. Bob Dylan would make?

In early 1965, Dylan informed the host of a TV chat show that he planned to make a "horror cowboy movie." (Asked if he'd be cast as the horror cowboy, he replied that, no, he'd be playing his mother.) That spring, Dylan visited the Warhol Factory and sat for two screen tests — one impassively behind shades and another smoking a cigarette and glaring at the camera. As a gift, Warhol presented him with a silver Elvis painting, which Dylan would give to Albert Grossman in return for a couch. Soon after, Dylan was starring in his own vehicle, Don't Look Back's account of his 1965 British tour. Too much of nothing is revealed: A hypersensitive 24-year-old attempts to cope with mega-celebrity. The inability of virtually everyone to respond to him as a normal person is a given. Meanwhile, local journalists play a collective Margaret Dumont to Dylan's sour Groucho: Who does this guy think he is? (In I'm Not There, Haynes dramatizes the press's revenge — outing Jude Quinn's suppressed middle-class Jewish origins.)

Don't Look Back premiered two years later at the same Summer of Love Montreal Film Festival that opened with Bonnie and Clyde — with Dylan already many months into post-motorcycle-accident seclusion. Hardly a substitute for a new album, Pennebaker's film reprised the uneasy last days of Dylan's pre-electric incarnation. It was nevertheless received as a breakthrough, the first feature-length vérité pop-star portrait. Dylan, however, must not have cared for it: He appropriated the footage that Pennebaker shot of his 1966 British tour (meant for a TV documentary) and — working with filmmaker Howard Alk — produced his own perversely pulverized version. At once withholding and self-indulgent, Eat the Document fragments brilliant onstage performances in favor of Dylan's backstage riffs with soul mate Robbie Robertson and other members of the entourage.

Although much of the footage would appear, even more perversely re-normalized, in No Direction Home (and provided material for the Jude Quinn sequences in I'm Not There), Eat the Document was never really released. As befits a would-be underground movie, it had its theatrical premiere at the Whitney Museum. Dylan, meanwhile, was down in Mexico, making his first "real" movie, Sam Peckinpah's hippie western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Peckinpah supposedly had no clear idea who the singer was. Both the star, Kris Kristofferson, and the screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, would take credit for recruiting Dylan to play the Kid's smirky sidekick; Dylan, however, was surely responsible for naming his character "Alias."

Did Bob Dylan really exist? Such was the question posed four years later, when Dylan directed his celluloid magnum opus, Renaldo & Clara. This four-hour extravaganza was born as a rockumentary of the 1975-76 "Rolling Thunder" tour; its purpose, according to the filmmaker, was "to put forth a certain vision which I carry around, and can't express on any other canvas."

Hired to write dialogue — little of which would be used — Sam Shepard was enjoined to study the epic backstage love story Children of Paradise (the one previous movie that Dylan thought to have successfully "stopped time") and Truffaut's New Wave noir, Shoot the Piano Player. ("Is that the kind of movie you want to make?" Shepard asked, receiving the laconic reply: "Something like that.") Scorsese, who first met Dylan when he was shooting The Last Waltz in late '76, remembers a more suggestive model: Dylan spoke to him about R.W. Fassbinder's Beware of the Holy Whore, "a film about the collective idea and about its impossibility."

To dream the impossible dream: Fassbinder would have had an easier time imagining Dylan than vice versa. Shortly before Renaldo & Clara's release, Dylan gave an interview to Rolling Stone in which he took care to name-check (and patronize) the two key filmmakers of the '60s: "Warhol did a lot for American cinema," he explained. "He was before his time." As for Godard, Dylan recalled that, although he had never seen a movie like Breathless, once he did, it seemed totally familiar; he remembered thinking, "Yeah man, why didn't I do that, I could have done that."