LE MONDE'S OPINION: SEE IT

American cinema, whose natural inclination is toward myth, loves to make films about Bob Dylan. Donn Alan Pennebaker, one of the masters of direct cinema, filmed his wild 1965 tour in England (Don't Look Back, 1967). Dylan himself later embarked on a filmed hippie trip that left many people scratching their heads (Renaldo and Clara, 1978). Martin Scorsese documented his legendary 1961-1966 period in a monumental montage film (No Direction Home, 2005) before coming back, somewhere between truth and fable, on his incredible 1975 tour (Rolling Thunder Revue. A Bob Dylan Story, 2019).

As for Todd Haynes, he went in a more conceptual direction and cast six different actors to play the elusive idol (I'm Not There, 2007). The Coen brothers, meanwhile, portrayed him in silhouette, a young stranger entering the darkness of a Greenwich bar and strumming three chords of "Farewell" in the half-light under the worried eye of Llewyn Davis, the anti-hero of their film, a folk singer whose arduous career surely comes to an end with this finale (Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013). In its scholarly brilliance, it may just make it the best film on Dylan. Honestly.

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