perfect film, but not a bio-pic (and that's just fine...)

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2008)

A.O. Scott's review in the NY Times, while clearly worshipful of Dylan, appreciates Haynes' film exactly as it deserves. This is not a bio-pic of Dylan, nor is it a 50s/60s/70s travelogue. Some of my fellow readers here and elsewhere seem to miss this point: one wrote "The film loses itself in its pieces and fails to draw them together into a whole picture by way of a stringent narrative." Um... exactly. That might be the point about Dylan that the film is making. I do think, though, that the film as a film is brilliant, compelling, thoughtful, beautiful. Don't expect 'Walk the Line' (and I love Johnny more than I do Dylan, actually...) when what we're getting is something much, much finer in film-making: a work of art. This is a better tribute to Bob Dylan than a slavish recreation of a life, an assembled biography (nothing against biography!). In the world of art - as opposed to biography - it doesn't matter whether Dylan's first wife was an exotic playboy bunny or an exotic French painter. Tom Stoppard gives Oscar Wilde the following words in 'The Invention of Love': "Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything. It is the truth about me." Dylan and Haynes both understand this, I think.