On Christmas day 2024, A Complete Unknown was unleashed on movie theaters, igniting renewed interest in Bob Dylan’s mythical rise from folk troubadour to rock music icon.
The biopic, directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet, centers on Dylan’s life from 1961 to 1965. During those pivotal years, Dylan arrived in New York City, wrote some generation-defining protest songs and was embraced by the folk music community — only to be cast aside after “going electric” with a more rock-oriented sound.
Like all biopics, A Complete Unknown does not tell the whole story of its subject. For Dylan, whose public persona has remained as ungraspable as the wind in one of his signature songs, it's simply impossible to summarize such a life in a single film.
Fortunately, Dylan is no stranger to the movies, having appeared in well over a dozen feature films and documentaries over the past half-century or so.
If you're looking for more after watching A Complete Unknown, here's our list of the five best Bob Dylan movies to watch, ranked in order of release date — all of them featuring either Dylan’s music or, in most cases, Dylan himself.
Dont Look Back (1967)
The now-iconic scene of Bob Dylan flipping through cue cards scrawled with the lyrics of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is perhaps the most “staged” portion of Dont Look Back. The highly influential rockumentary charts Dylan’s 1965 England tour, taking a fly-on-the-wall approach to capture surprisingly candid and revealing moments of the singer behind the scenes.
Dont Look Back was directed by D. A. Pennebaker, a pioneer of the cinéma vérité, or “direct cinema,” style. The film features no voice-over narration or interviews. Instead, Pennebaker’s camera simply observes Dylan in (and out of) his element on the road.
When he’s not performing on stage, Dylan drifts into hotel rooms and taxis, jamming with fellow musicians and getting into spats with reporters. Sporting dark sunglasses and a cocky, paranoid swagger, Dylan was rarely more in command of his art — or more aware of the growing mystique surrounding it.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Bob Dylan was in somewhat of a slump by the time he was brought on to write music for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He had recently released the critically reviled Self Portrait, an album Dylan later claimed to be an intentional attempt at self-sabotage.
But his work as composer (and actor!) on Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac Western seemed to breathe new life into the famed singer. The soundtrack album that accompanied the film’s release features one of Dylan’s most popular songs, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and his small on-screen role is nothing to sneeze at either.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid tells the story of two former friends who find themselves on opposing sides of the law. James Coburn plays Garrett, a newly hired sheriff who is forced to hunt down Billy, played by Kris Kristofferson. Dylan, meanwhile, plays a mysterious loner named Alias.
Although not a professionally trained actor, Dylan has an unmistakable aura in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In one memorable scene, Alias is forced (at gunpoint) to read the labels on dozens of pantry items. The way Dylan delivers the lines, you’ll never hear the word “beans” the same way again.
No Direction Home (2005)
Directed by legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, this mammoth two-part documentary is an immersive and mesmerizing account of Bob Dylan’s early career in the 1960s, filled with astonishing archival footage and illuminating interviews.
Fellow musicians like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger weigh in on Dylan’s artistry, while other interviewees speak to the singer’s private life — most notably, Suze Rotolo, who dated Dylan in the early ‘60s and famously appeared on the cover of his landmark album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Best of all, Dylan himself gives a rare on-camera interview, sharing insights about his upbringing in Minnesota, his arrival in Greenwich Village and his whirlwind transformation into a cultural icon.
Despite clocking in at over three hours, No Direction Home is an absorbing and incredibly breezy watch — thanks, no doubt, to Scorsese’s masterful storytelling. The Oscar winner slyly opens the film with one of the last public performances Dylan gave before his fateful motorcycle accident in 1966. It’s a clever bit of foreshadowing that reflects Dylan’s own unique way of cheating death, of achieving a certain kind of immortality.
I’m Not There (2007)
I’m Not There is the only film on this list that doesn't feature Bob Dylan himself, and yet it may be the most Dylanesque movie of them all. Defying traditional storytelling conventions, director Todd Haynes cast six actors to portray different incarnations — different lives — of the enigmatic singer.
It all unfolds in a nonlinear pattern, jumping back and forth between various plotlines. We see a young boy hitching a ride on a train, a hotshot actor caught in a turbulent romance, even a middle-aged outlaw that may or may not be Billy the Kid. The actors who play these versions of Dylan include Christian Bale, Richard Gere and, in one of his final on-screen appearances, Heath Ledger.
However, it’s Cate Blanchett who steals the show. She was nominated for an Oscar for her interpretation of a mid-'60s Dylan, delivering a livewire performance that buzzes with nervous energy and coiled charisma.
Admittedly, the rest of the cast gets eclipsed a bit by Blanchett. But I’m Not There remains a fascinating anti-biopic — a shape-shifting portrait of an artist who refuses to be pinned down or boxed in.
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019)
Martin Scorsese’s second documentary about Bob Dylan takes an unconventional approach to its subject, willfully blending fact and fiction when recounting what “really happened” on the Rolling Thunder Revue. That was the tour Dylan headlined in the mid-'70s, when he and a group of fellow musicians and poets traveled to smaller venues to “play for the people.”
But that’s only scratching the surface. At one point in the film, Dylan quips, “I don’t remember a thing about Rolling Thunder. I mean, it happened so long ago I wasn’t even born.”
Dylan, ever the trickster, might actually be on to something. Rolling Thunder Revue, in many ways, was about reinvention, perhaps even rebirth. Dylan famously donned white face paint during the tour to perform wildly reinterpreted renditions of his own songs. It was almost as if he was assuming a new mask, conjuring a new identity of his own making.
Scorsese gets in on the act, incorporating stories about the tour from interviewees who were never actually there. Aptly subtitled A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, it’s less a documentary and more a fictionalized retelling of a nonfiction event, a lovingly assembled puzzle about the artifice of art itself.