Dont’t go about doubting Bob Dylan the singer. Or bracketing Bob Dylan the man. Many have learned this, often the hard way, through the 60-odd years that the shape-shifting artiste has been around, tweaking his past, changing it all from his looks and religion to his music, and still standing, strumming his guitar – including on what is admiringly described as a ‘Never Ending Tour’, since 1988.
Can the beautiful, beautiful Timothée Chalamet be this slippery, sullen creature with the sublime talent (who years later would skip his own Nobel Prize ceremony)? Chalamet tries, and is impressive with his guitar playing and his singing (it ain’t the raspy Dylan though), and the scowl and disaffection that hang constantly around Dylan just a couple of years into fandom in the early 1960s.
However, his Dylan has to lay out this disenchantment in words, again and again, for us to be in tune. Chalamet is “too pretty” – as Dylan once says of Joan Baez’s songs – for the darker shades, too cool for the mercurial changes.
