Film

Bob Dylan or Cate Blanchett? The title might tell us to not look back, but for younger viewers rapt by Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (still going strong at Film Forum), the temptation is irresistible.

So let’s go deeper into both films: Pennebaker’s documentary, shot in England, 1965, just after the crest of Beatlemania, has the improvised feel of classic vérité—smudged and
fly-on-the-wall lucky. Dylan plays Royal Albert Hall to a rousing ovation; he lolls around hotel rooms with Donovan and spars with painfully polite journalists.

Haynes recasts this landmark material in a crisper, harsher b&w, more indebted to Fellini’s 8½ and the idea of a frightening media circus. Things certainly do get crazy for Dylan in the original Don’t Look Back, with fans jumping on the car and Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman antagonizing everyone. But Pennebaker’s truth is far more complicated than Haynes’s—how could it not be? The folk star is surlier, already aware of how to exploit his own magnetism. His rejoinders are defensive and peevish, especially his “How do you have the nerve to ask me that?” to a befuddled Time reporter. It’s no wonder that fans found Pennebaker’s film to be unflattering; Dylan is obnoxious.

Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated turn is subtler and sympathetic, a keyhole into Haynes’s organizing principle of the hunted artist. Pennebaker, conversely, would make a career of stripping rock of its pretenses (even with Bowie in the film Ziggy Stardust). Don’t Look Back reveals a fascinatingly flawed Dylan, a kid in fancy London playacting and preening as much as professing. As such, it’s completely riveting.