It may have taken decades for Bob Dylan to receive Academy-bait biopic treatment, but finally it happened. A Complete Unknown is James Mangold’s film about Dylan’s West Village ascension in the early 1960s, with Timothée Chalamet starring behind the shades as Dylan.

The fact that the only other Dylan biopic — Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) — employed six different actors to play the central role suggests the size of Chalamet’s task: Dylan is completely sui generis, the metamorphic nature of his career marking him as an artist impossible to define or depict. Do you play him as the earnest young folk singer of his debut album, or the flayed Rimbaud figure of Blonde on Blonde only three years later, with Dylan juiced up on amphetamines and a “thin, wild mercury sound” to him?

I’m Not There gets around this partly by using a child actor (Marcus Carl Franklin) and an androgynous Cate Blanchett alongside the more “correct” Dylan stand-ins (e.g. Ben Whishaw), an approach that aptly mirrors the many characters Dylan has styled throughout his life, both in his career as a singer-songwriter and on the big screen too.

If Haynes’ film is symbolistic and formally daring, A Complete Unknown appears to be more in the mode of the rote, boring music biopic, and while I can’t confess to having seen it, from what I can glean from promotional materials, Chalamet hits all the physical beats while also looking like someone has dressed their child as Bob Dylan for Halloween. Dylan himself has vouched for Chalamet’s casting, though, and in a post on X hinted at the mutability that his stand-in will have to strive for: “I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”

Chalamet said he was unfamiliar with Dylan when approached for the project, but has since been converted to the “Church of Bob”. It’s doubtless that part of this conversion would’ve involved studying the many incarnations of Dylan in the Movies, then, king of which is D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), which captures Dylan on tour in England in 1965, his last outing as a purely acoustic act.

Billed as, variously, a concert-film and a documentary, Don’t Look Back is both things and neither, with only segments of Dylan’s live performances included and the frantic backstage footage more akin to a Hard Day’s Night (1964) than factual reportage. Dylan isn’t acting per se, but he is playing himself, or at least this version of himself: skinny and sullen behind sunglasses, all in black, blessed with emergent genius and superior because. This is still the quintessential Dylan iconography.

Whether it’s one-upping an awestruck Donovan, or stopping a raucous room-party to demand that whoever threw a glass out of the window make themselves known, Dylan is very much giving a performance in Don’t Look Back. He would do this again in the documentary form, most recently for Martin Scorsese in Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), a seemingly straightforward talking-head doc in the manner of No Direction Home (2005). It’s only on closer inspection that Rolling Thunder is revealed to be full of Dylan’s lies and leg-pulls, not least the insertion of the Revue’s “director”, a tell-all interviewee on the face of it but actually a fictional character played by an actor.

But what about Dylan’s own fictional performances, of which there are a handful, scattered among the many lives he has both lived and invented on screen? First off, there’s his turn as Alias (the name is no coincidence), a small part in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), for which Dylan wrote the soundtrack. It’s common opinion that Dylan is “bad” in Pat Garrett. And while that may be true of the technical quality of his performance, it remains that you can’t help but look for him when he’s not there. Peckinpah himself felt this, enlarging Dylan’s role from an unmemorable member of Billy’s gang to a mercurial newspaperman who follows The Kid around (the idea being that Alias would later tell Billy’s tale, weaving fictions and printing the myth).

Accordingly, the camera cuts to Dylan when it doesn’t make sense to, an effect that catches both viewer and actor off guard, Dylan jerky and awkward, his speech littered with “uh’s”, his eyes (“blue as robin’s eggs”, per Joan Baez) blazing out from beneath the brim of a cowboy hat. His compositions may motor the movie, but Dylan’s perplexing performance (his key scene has him read out the labels of bean cans) further inflects it with a mournful unknowability. It’s a slim role, but Dylan exudes enough enigma to make it stick.

He is less successful for Richard Marquand in Hearts of Fire (1987), playing co-lead in a film released at time of creative standstill for Dylan, just out of his Christian run of albums and yet to be reborn again with Oh Mercy in 1989. Sporting a touch of mustard-yellow in his curls, Dylan mumbles his way through a film only available on YouTube and best left there.

Of much more importance is Masked and Anonymous (2003), which Dylan co-wrote with Larry Charles, who also directs, shooting it like it’s a hostage video. The film was disparaged upon release, and its reputation has only slightly improved with Letterboxd and time — it’s now considered a curio! While it’s true that the film has a lowdown look and dialogue that proves “only Dylan can do Dylan” — in other peoples’ mouths his words can seem shallow — its supposed demerits are actually the things that most recommend it: its inscrutability and ill-advisedness, as well as its determination to describe a New Weird America (to paraphrase Greil Marcus). Best of all, Masked and Anonymous is like a Dylan song come to life: unconcerned with passing fashion and completely out of time.

Dylan ostensibly plays the lead, his Jack Fate a washed-up midlist rock star who makes a return for a benefit concert in a country run by a perverted dictator. Dylan looks physically uncomfortable in front of the camera, an era away from the restless energy he showed on stage and film during the Rolling Thunder tour, which he captured hundreds of hours of and turned into Renaldo and Clara (1978). That restlessness is still there in Masked and Anonymous, but he reserves it for his face, which squints and slants and never stills. Beneath it, his body looks like it’s stuck on inhale. You start to wonder if the reason Dylan speaks in clipped aphorism, rarely ever putting multiple sentences together, is so that the camera can slew away and he can breathe again. He does, at least, have the good sense to surround himself with an absolutely stacked cast of A-List and respected actors, many of whom took pay cuts to work with Dylan.

Despite this, Dylan is oddly moving in Masked and Anonymous. He has a great face for staring ruefully out of windows while his own masterpieces play, and in the film’s musical set pieces you see the thrill of his artistry blow away the amateur aspects of his performance style, which at worst is wooden but at best wouldn’t look out of place in Twin Peaks: The Return, a Lynch link backed up by critic Will Sloan, who calls Masked and Anonymous Dylan’s Inland Empire, “a state of the union of Bob Dylan’s subconscious.”

Robert Zimmerman. Arthur Rimbaud. Alias. Jack Fate: Bob Dylan has played many parts and many people. Misdirection, unknowability, masks, myths: these are his modes, and his long history in the movies suggests it as an art form perfect for his protean wiles, shapeshifting with the medium, always busy being born. “Who are you?” someone asks early on in Pat Garrett. It’s a good question.