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**JANUARY 15, 2025**

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Kuttner on TAP

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**** It Ain't Me, Babe

When biopics get it wrong-and occasionally get it just right

I am a serious fan of biopics. My complaint is that too many of them mess with history, try to sex things up, and that there are some real people so singular that they should only play themselves, such as Martin Luther King.

On the other hand, sometimes a biopic gets it right-the 2023 movie

**Oppenheimer**, Gary Oldman as Churchill in

**Darkest Hour**(2017),

**The King's Speech**, from 2010 (on George VI overcoming his stuttering),

**The Imitation Game**(2014

**)** on Alan Turing, and very surprisingly, the new Bob Dylan movie,

**A Complete Unknown**, which I was prepared to hate.

I had put Dylan in the MLK category-nobody could dare play the role of Dylan but Dylan. Indeed, in 1965, Columbia Records actually had an ad slogan: "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan."

Well, quite apart from Timoth??e Chalamet channeling Dylan better than Dylan does, and Ed Norton perfectly nailing the gentle Pete Seeger, the movie also gets the political arguments and cultural schisms over Dylan just right, as well as the larger context and spirit of the times from 1961 to 1965.

Most importantly, the film captures Dylan's refusal to be a pawn in anyone's game, with all the attendant nuances. Dylan refused to be defined by his producers or his fans, nor confined to any musical genre, nor recruited to be more explicitly political than he chose. Nor would he be possessed by any one woman.

His girlfriend of that era, Suze Rotolo, is pictured with Dylan in the cover photo of Dylan's 1963 breakthrough studio album. The title,

**The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan**, must have seemed all too apt and painfully ironic to Rotolo. In the photo, she is clinging to him for dear life. Meanwhile, he was having an on-and-off love/hate affair with Joan Baez.

All of this and more is depicted with precision, and the precision was no accident. Beyond Chalamet's sheer virtuosity and the faithfulness of director James Mangold to the history, Bob Dylan himself did a table read and approved the script.

Mangold also directed the excellent 2005 Johnny Cash movie

**Walk the Line**, in which Cash talks about sending admiring letters to the young Dylan. This is nicely reprised in

**A Complete Unknown**.

By contrast, I thought the 2023 biopic

**Rustin**, one of my heroes, was dreadful, especially since there was an actual documentary on Bayard Rustin, Brother Outsider [link removed], with the actual Rustin, made about 20 years ago, that was superb. The biopic was oversimplified, with cheesy dialogue and invented episodes.

[link removed]

Another failed biopic was

**The Trial of the Chicago 7**, made in 2020. The movie is ballpark accurate. Demonstrations happened around the 1968 Democratic Convention. They turned into what an investigating commission later called a "police riot." But the movie plays fast and loose with the seven defendants, most notably Tom Hayden, who deliberately led peaceful demonstrators into a trap where they would be savaged by cops. The radical Hayden is turned into a choirboy, and several other characters and events are misrepresented. These deceptions are on Aaron Sorkin.

By contrast, another Chicago biopic,

**Judas and the Black Messiah**(2021), on the police murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton in 1969, aided by an FBI spy, got it all just right, including the ugly history, the Hampton character, and the complex role of the Panthers. Daniel Kaluuya, who played Hampton, won the Academy Award.

What the successful biopics have in common is that they don't mess with the history, which is plenty powerful in its own right, and the audience learns something. In the case of

**Oppenheimer** and

**The Imitation Game**, upwards of 95 percent of the audience probably had no prior idea of this history. Likewise

**Judas and the Black Messiah**.

As our colleague David Dayen observes, most recent musical biopics are especially fictionalized and lame. The glut includes recent biopics on Freddie Mercury, Elton John, and Amy Winehouse. It's like Marvel movies, only with music, Dayen says.

Invented episodes in movies about musical performers are less consequential than rewriting biography that depicts important history. By contrast,

**A Complete Unknown** is far more than a musical biopic and it gets those historic times, the early '60s, just right. Before the Dylan movie, the standout musical biopic was The Buddy Holly Story, in which Gary Busey channeled the sainted Buddy perfectly, the story and the era, as well as the music.

Historically accurate biopics are relatively new, as our colleague Harold Meyerson points out. In Hollywood's first hundred years, producers and writers using historical or biographical themes felt free to invent facts. The 1942 film

**Yankee Doodle Dandy**, with Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, had little to do with the real Cohan, but it was still good entertainment. Some of the best ones of that era were not strictly speaking biopics, but movies loosely based on real events that accurately captured the larger import, including classics like

**On the Waterfront**(1954) or

**Casablanca**(1942).

I have had a personal experience with the tendency of screenwriters and producers to try to "improve" on history. I wrote a treatment for a screenplay based on actual events that I was personally involved with. I was part of a writers' room that developed the treatment into a script. I saw firsthand the tendency of screenwriters to try to improve on a history that was plenty dramatic and suspenseful, with real-life characters torn between honor and expediency. And that tinkering was only the first step, as producers and then distributor platforms try to further improve the history.

These commercial pressures are immense, and God bless the filmmakers who resist them. At a moment when so much of the media, especially social media, plays fast and loose with the truth, and ever fewer students get a serious education in history, it's up to filmmakers to fill in some of those blanks, as honestly as possible. My young grandchildren have never taken an American history course, but they all have detailed and accurate knowledge of a crucial era in the history of the early republic, from

**Hamilton**.

A favorite Dylan word was

**compromise**, invariably used with scorn. Dylan didn't compromise. Neither should filmmakers who base movies on real people.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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