Top 25 Bob Dylan films and videos
“The funny thing about fame is that nobody believes it’s you”
– Bob Dylan, 60 Minutes Ed Bradley Interview (2004)
Bob Dylan fansite Expecting Rain has recently been buzzing with reports of shooting finally starting – after four years of delays – on A Complete Unknown, the film starring the ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan, beginning with his arrival in New York City in 1961 and his meteoric rise to fame.
With questionable abilities as an actor and director, Dylan has nevertheless amassed a fascinating filmography which includes feature films, documentaries, concerts, interviews and music videos* – often all rolled up in the same movie and blurring distinctions between fact and fiction.
In his songs Dylan has likewise dabbled in the movies, often mentioning actors and films, as well as peppering his lyrics with lines from films. Over the years he has expressed his love for many directors including Francois Truffaut and Frederico Fellini, and Les Enfants du Paradis was said to be an inspiration for Renaldo & Clara (though I read somewhere – and agree – that Jacques Rivette would seem a more apt influence, though he denied knowing his films).
As a teenager Dylan had a James Dean obsession and has referenced him over the years in songs and interviews. In his songs he has mentioned numerous other actors ranging from Brigitte Bardot (I Shall be Free, 1963) to Indiana Jones (I Contain Multitudes, 2020). His mostly poor 1985 album Empire Burlesque was notable for containing dialogue from old Humphrey Bogart films and even an episode of Star Trek (this site, mentioned previously, has found 61 film references in the album).
Best of all, Brownsville Girl – co-written with Sam Shepherd who also helped pen Renaldo & Clara – an 11-minute epic from Knocked Out Loaded (1986), focuses around The Gunfighter, a 1950 film starring Gregory Peck.
In his 2022 book The Philosophy of Song, Dylan writes, “People keep talking about making America great again. Maybe they should start with the movies”.
Bob Dylan’s chameleon-like persona and constant reinvention, his love of tall tales and notions of what is a performance and what is reality is perfectly suited to the fluid and artificial nature of film.
*And adverts. In a 1965 interview he was presumably joking when he replied to the question that if he ever sold out to a commercial interest it would be to “ladies garments.” In 2004, he appeared in a Victoria’s Secret commercial (which almost made my top 25) to the tune of Love Sick. (In similar hindsight, the film Hearts of Fire (1986) has Dylan as a washed up rock singer saying “I always knew I was one of those rock ‘n’ roll singers that was never gonna win any Nobel Prize,” which he actually did win in 2016.)
1. Dont Look Back (1967)
Not just the best Dylan film, but one of the best documentaries ever as we follow the young troubadour in England during his 1965 tour of the country, his last acoustic outing before going electric.
Best line: (Dylan) “Give the anarchist a cigarette.”
2. I’m Not There (2007)
Dylan’s first proper biopic was never going to be a conventional affair. With his name not even mentioned in the film, and played by six different actors, including a black boy and a white woman, it didn’t disappoint in its depiction of the many sides of Bob Dylan. For newcomers to Dylan the film made little sense, for fans, the different actors and time shifts seemed almost obvious.
Best line: (Billy the Kid) “I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time.”
3. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Peckinpah’s much-maligned elegiac western pitches sheriff James Coburn with his posse of old western character actors including Slim Pickens and Jack Elam against some of the young counter-culture singer-songwriters of the day, including Kris Kristofferson as Billy, Rita Coolidge, Bob Dylan and Harry Dean Stanton. Dylan’s wonderful soundtrack perfectly captures the mood of the film.
Best lines: (Garrett) Who are you?
(Alias) That’s a good question.
4. No Direction Home (2005)
Martin Scorsese’s 3½ hour documentary of Dylan’s early years is a complete pleasure, with superb archive material and interviews, including Dylan himself on good form.
5. Eat the Document (1972)
One of two films directed by Dylan himself, this rarely seen experimental documentary of his 1966 tour of the UK with The Hawks (soon to become The Band) – his first after going electric the previous year – was, like Dont Look Back, filmed by D.A. Pennebaker. Originally shot for the ABC series Stage ’66, it was rejected as being incomprehensible.
6. Renaldo & Clara (1978)
Eat the Document is less than an hour long; Renaldo & Clara, Dylan’s other directed movie, has a four hour running time, and is similarly confusing and freewheeling as we follow Dylan on his Rolling Thunder tour of 1975. Again we get amazing concert footage with Dylan wearing a wide-brimmed hat and mask or painted white face, intercut with random footage as well as interviews and some kind of plot.
7. Hard Rain (1976)
I love Dylan’s 1976 tour almost as much as his 1975 or 1966 ones. The ‘76 sound is almost punk in the way Dylan spits out the words in songs from Blood on the Tracks including Idiot Wind and Shelter From the Storm. This NBC-TV Special was broadcast in September 1976 from a May concert. Despite the album and film being poorly received at the time* (it was the penultimate gig of the tour, Dylan had lost his passion, maybe everyone was fed up), it’s a great film and should be given an official Blu-ray release (though an album of the tour was released at the time as Hard Rain, the 1976 concerts have never received the Bootleg Series treatment that the 1975 or 1966 gigs have).
*It’s hard to please everyone. When Bob Dylan at Budokan was released in 1978 (and The Complete Budokan, 2023, of the same concerts), there were complaints the concerts chosen were too early in the tour and the band hadn’t warmed up; similarly when Real Live was released, the wrong concerts were chosen from the 1984 tour (despite a blistering, rewritten Tangled up in Blue). Sigh. Obviously, the thing to do is just to release everything, like with the 1966 Live Recordings box set.
8. The Last Waltz (1978)
The Band’s farewell concert in November 1976 had a host of guest appearances, including Dylan, who had toured with The Band several times since 1966, performing half a dozen songs. Scorsese directs his first of three Dylan-related docs.
9. The Other Side of the Mirror (2007)
Essential documentary by Murray Lerner charting Dylan’s performances at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963-1965, culminating in his controversial electric performances of Maggie’s Farm and Like a Rolling Stone and the myth that folk singer Pete Seeger cut the cables with an axe.
10. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019)
Though I thought this, frankly, a wasted opportunity (just release Renaldo & Clara already!), any chance to see Rolling Thunder footage is worth the price of admission, plus the whole ‘pseudo-documentary’ concept (interviews with fictional characters, including Sharon Stone playing, er, herself) must have made Dylan chuckle to himself.
Best line: (Dylan) “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything. It’s about creating yourself.”
11. The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)
At this point, Dylan had barely performed live for years; he walked on in a jean jacket and played a stunning mini-set of five songs, backed by George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Leon Russell.
Best line: George Harrison introducing Dylan still sends shivers down my spine: “I’d like to bring on a friend of us all, Mr Bob Dylan…”
12. Shadow Kingdom (2023)
Stunning black and white concert film, initially released online-only with viewers expecting a live concert. It was instead a film shot over seven days on a sound stage in California made to look like a smoky Parisian nightclub. The album released from it is technically Dylan’s second (full) soundtrack album after Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
13. Masked and Anonymous (2003)
A musical comedy western, if you will, co-written by Dylan and Seinfeld-writer Larry Charles, with an all-star cast including Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Luke Wilson and Val Kilmer, to name quite a few. Dylan himself plays Jack Fate, a singer sprung from jail to perform at a benefit concert for a fictitious America torn apart by civil war. The plot, as one reviewer put it in a Dylanesque manner, ‘depends on your point of view’.
Best line: (Dylan) “The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you’ll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.”
14. Trouble No More (2017)
Released with the Bootleg Series Vol. 13 Deluxe Edition, the film intersperses footage of Dylan’s electrifying 1980 religious ‘Born Again’ concerts with Michael Shannon playing a preacher.
15. 65 Revisited (2007)
Feature film outtakes left over from Dont Look Back, including a dozen songs and an alternative cue card scene from the earlier film.
16. Odds and Ends (2021)
What is says; a compilation of Dylan interviews, videos, concerts and documentaries over the years, co-directed by John Hillcoat, director of The Road, The Proposition and countless music videos.
17. Blood in my Eyes video (1993)
Filmed in black and white, this has Dylan walking around Camden Town in a top hat, suit and gloves, looking like an elder statesman chatting to his people. It’s one of my favourite music videos ever.
18. San Francisco Press Conference (1965)
As Dylan’s fame grew, so his press conferences increased, as did the idiotic questions from mostly middle-aged journalists trying to pigeonhole Dylan. Dylan keeps them guessing amid clouds of cigarette smoke.
Best line: “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.”
19. The Madhouse on Castle Street (1963)
A BBC play televised in 1963 which featured a young Bob Dylan performing four songs in between the action, which concerned a lodger who declared he’s locked himself in his boarding house room until the world changes. Sounds a good idea. Unfortunately the play, which contained one of the first public performances of Blowin’ in the Wind, was destroyed in 1968.
Best line: “I have decided to retire from the world.”
20. MTV Unplugged (1989)
I didn’t think it was so bad.
21. Rehearsing We are the World (1985)
A recent Netflix documentary about the making of We are the World, called The Greatest Night in Pop, reminded me of this footage. The YouTube clip comments are almost as gold as the video, with nuggets like “It’s almost like he doesn’t know he’s Bob Dylan” and “Bob looks like an atheist who’s forced to sing in a church.” But nothing compares to Rembert Browne’s hilarious 2012 second-by-second account of the clip, Rembert Explains the ’80s: Bob Dylan Rehearses ‘We Are the World’.
Best line: (Dylan) “I don’t think that’s any good at all.”
22. Hearts of Fire (1987)
Helmed by Return of the Jedi director Richard Marquand, who died of a heart attack (aged 49) just before the film’s premiere. Here Dylan plays a reclusive rock star come out of retirement to take upcoming singer Fiona to England, where they meet another singer, Rupert Everett. I don’t have anything to add to that description except to say it’s awful and contains the fakest punch ever committed to film. Somehow I have the soundtrack on vinyl.
Best line: (Dylan) “Got any Johnny Cash albums?”
23. Catchfire (AKA Backtrack) (1990)
This lame Dennis Hopper and Jodie Foster thriller has a Dylan cameo, playing a chainsaw artist. His performance, which lasts less than a minute, is more wooden than the sculptures he creates (which are actually by sculptor and painter Charles Arnoldi). Hopper, who directed the mess (though disowned it and the film used the goto pseudonym Alan Smithee as director), was also a keen photographer, painter and art collector, and knew Laddie Dill and Charles Arnoldi personally.
Best lines: (Dylan) “Use something less threatening, more abstract. My friend Laddie Dill, he works in concrete.”
(Hopper) “Yeah, I used to work in concrete, too, shoes. Art! Huh! Fuckin’ artist.”
24. 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (1992)
Celebrating 30 years of Dylan as a recording artist, the concert in 1992 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, featured numerous singers paying their respects to Dylan, from Neil Young (who dubbed the event Bobfest) to Lou Reed. Dylan sang a few tracks too.
25. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts video (2020)
Oh, I almost forgot to include the video I edited. Naomi Bedford and her Rolling Ramshackle Revue do a tremendous cover of the epic Dylan classic from Blood on the Tracks.