Michael Glover-Smith. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think. McNidder and Grace, 2026. 244 pp.
Review by Robert Reginio, Alfred University
Any survey of Dylan’s work in film—as opposed to his appearances on screen in videos or other cinematic projects—is a salvage operation. Films like Eat the Document (1972) or Renaldo and Clara (1978) have been actively suppressed by Dylan and by the filmmakers associated with these films, following Dylan’s lead. The theatrical lives of these films were short-lived, Dylan retreating, it might be said, from poor ticket sales and critical disparagement at the time of their release. For us now, Dylan’s primary experiments in film circulate as bootleg copies or as a series of selected scenes online. As whole works of cinematic art, we often do not have access to the complete texts of these films besides less-than-pristine copies sourced from earlier copies.
Additionally, for the writer seeking to explore Dylan as filmmaker, the stunning, electrifying performance footage from the 1966 tour and the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue (arguably the centerpieces, respectively, of those two Dylan-directed and -edited films) have already been incorporated by other filmmakers. Martin Scorsese used the performance footage from both of these projects in No Direction Home and The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. A documentary and a mockumentary, these two films neglect the seriously considered editorial work and cinematic patterning of Dylan and his cinematic collaborators. And it must be said that for many followers of Dylan’s work, it is the restored footage of these performances that makes both Scorsese projects worth the price of admission. It takes, then, concerted critical work to place these performance clips back into the cinematic experiments they came from, and to assess and evaluate films like Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara as carefully conceived pieces of cinematic expression.
In his book Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think (McNidder and Grace, 2026), Michael Glover Smith surveys the production histories and the initial reception of these films to recreate them not as grab bags for single performance clips but as works of cinematic art that stand on their own. Smith’s assertion rings true that the films that Dylan had editorial or script control over are “commendable for [their] fierce independence” (consisting of the triad of Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, and 2003’s Masked and Anonymous) (156). The main takeaway from Smith’s book is a set of references to touchstone films for Dylan the filmmaker (often European avant-garde films) and a compendious set of filmographies (presented as two extensive appendices) supplementing the exposition of details related to the production histories of the films.
Smith’s book works well as a primer on the histories and broad contexts of these films in relation to Bob Dylan’s career. However, unlike Jonathan Hodgers’ 2024 monograph Bob Dylan on Film: The Intersection of Music and Visuals (Routledge), Smith eschews the kind of critical intervention that we find Hodgers making. Smith’s book covers the history of each film’s conception, development, and reception, whereas Hodgers’ text, which is a salvage operation of its own, can be recommended for its fine-grained analysis. Therefore, the two texts complement each other. Smith places the films in the practical world of production and editing, where Dylan as auteur exerts his primary influence, while Hodgers interrogates conceptual apparatuses like the auteur theory of cinematic production.
Smith relates that for Masked and Anonymous, Dylan left the difficult work of coordinating and collaborating to others, such as director Larry Charles. Unlike his work in the recording studio, where Dylan relies on a kind of telepathy between musicians to reconfigure a song, such a quasi-improvisatory mode of collaboration just doesn’t facilitate creation on a film set, where a director coordinates cinematographers, production designers, and others to express what is inherent in a script. Smith argues that Dylan’s role as script writer in Masked and Anonymous came after Dylan’s own exhausted response to the processes of directing and editing full-length movies like Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara. Throughout his career, Dylan remained fascinated with film, but the intense collaboration of filmmaking itself, and Dylan’s awareness of the intensity of that process, led him to seek out someone else as director.
Dylan’s role in Masked and Anonymous, Smith tells us, rested primarily in the pre-production process: it is the script that most bears Dylan’s imprint. He left the more difficult work of directing to Charles, though, as Smith notes, the commanding musical performances in Masked and Anonymous by Dylan and his current touring band “alone justify the movie’s existence” (102). This brings us once again to a core issue: is this not true of all of Dylan’s films? It seems, in Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara, the challenge for Dylan was to work in this medium as a filmmaker and not to use concert footage in a way that made the films mere vehicles for his live performances. Concert films they are not. Both these earlier films, in Smith’s recounting, seek to denaturalize the concert experience, rather than to replicate it. The core issue raised here is the play of visuals and music, where oftentimes the musical performances cast the rest of the filmic experiments in the critical shadows. Smith shines a light on these often-unstudied aspects of the films. That the book attempts to take Dylan’s work in film as such is one of its virtues.
In his introduction, Smith is correctly critical of Dylan’s interviews surrounding the release of Renaldo and Clara. Containing his most extensive comments about this film and his aim in the medium, these late 70s interviews have Dylan trucking in obfuscation, indicating a set of amorphous or archetypal themes that unify this sprawling project. Dylan’s 1984 interview with Martha Quinn about Dylan’s work (or lack thereof) in the new medium of music videos draws Smith’s attention. He notes that “Dylan’s comments about not wanting to ‘be the head of . . . ordering people around, telling them what to do’ and expressing his desire to not ‘do it myself’ but instead find a perfect filmmaking collaborator . . . go a long way towards explaining his subsequent forays into cinema” (10). What Dylan seems to have learned from his experiences with filmmaking earlier in his career is just how different the production of a film is from the production of an album. As an accomplished filmmaker himself, Smith is alive to the difficulty of learning this lesson. And yet he is right that the medium of film was not a passing fancy for Dylan, but something that attracted him throughout his career, from failures like 1987’s Hearts of Fire on to the 2021’s pandemic-era performance film Shadow Kingdom. In his introductory chapter, Smith makes the strong claim that the “most important thread” running through the Dylan filmography is “How does it feel to be Bob Dylan?” (Smith’s italics 12). Dylan’s deflections in the Jonathan Cott and Ron Rosenbaum interviews from the late 70s about Renaldo and Clara—his “New Age babble” and “pseudo-academic jargon” (6)—are of a piece with his deflections about the meanings of his songs: Dylan, in these instances, directs us away from his autobiography while opening the door to our own interpretive encounters with his art. Smith’s organizing rhetorical question (“How does it feel to be Bob Dylan?”), while potentially relevant to Eat the Document and Renaldo and Clara, limits the scope of the book by fastening the reader to a biographical paradigm of interpreting art. At the least, Bob Dylan as Filmmaker compels a reader to consider the difference between his songs (where the singer is not necessarily Dylan) and the films (where Dylan as cultural icon is an unavoidable presence). Smith narrows our focus to the standard stations of the Bob Dylan mythos, a mythos that bypasses an encounter with the strange world of Dylan’s films in favor of relating the biographical facts and fictions dedicated fans might already know. The book thereby makes familiar the unfamiliar worlds that the films under consideration create, and in so doing, reduces their strangeness and unfamiliarity.
This survey of Dylan’s work in film does not, however, lessen the importance of this book as primer for those fans who would like to go beyond the performance clips found, for example, in Scorsese’s documentaries. Written primarily for fans and not for scholars, the book shines a light on a network of cinematic references and genres that a reader can follow before turning back to each film with a renewed sense of its artistic impetus. An impressionistic film like Eat the Document, for instance, links to Dylan’s frenzied state of mind during 1966 (and especially during the controversial tour); additionally, the film seeks to rearrange audience expectations when it comes to a “concert film.”
Salient here, for Smith, are Jean-Luc Godard’s early films of the French New Wave. Smith writes that Dylan had “no road map” in putting together D.A. Pennebaker’s footage for Eat the Document (21). Smith writes about how Dylan sought to incorporate the discontinuous filmmaking modes set down by Godard in an “American” register. There’s a matrix of overlapping influences that Smith sketches for a reader. Godard, the student of American auteur cinema, especially film noir, reconfigured that tradition in a bracing way. Seminal films like Breathless were a touchstone for Dylan. Along with D.A. Pennebaker’s cinema verité Dont Look Back, Breathless influenced Dylan to re-see his own mythic American persona in the kaleidoscopic mélange of juxtapositions in Eat the Document.
While Smith does not hazard a reading of what Godard in an American key might mean for Dylan’s film, he clearly outlines continuities between Godard and Dylan’s editing of Eat the Document. As a result, the reader comes away from the book with a sense of Dylan as a student of European avant-garde cinema. Smith describes Godard’s A Woman is a Woman as containing “juxtapo[sitions of] the hyper-real with the hyper-fake,” which, according to Smith, Dylan was already practicing with his mid-60s pop music innovations. Equally interesting is Smith’s narration of the positive reception Eat the Document met in its early New York City screenings at the Whitney Museum in 1972. He puts to rest the notion that Eat the Document was completely “rejected” by audiences and critics. Citing positive reviews of the film during its initial screening at sites like the Whitney, the implication is that audiences aware of Godard and other avant-garde filmmakers would find nothing strange about Eat the Document.
On Renaldo and Clara, the other film besides Eat the Document that bears most heavily the imprint of Dylan’s creative cinematic decisions, Smith offers insights into its primary difference from (and development of) the style of Eat the Document. As an example, Smith details how the weaving of music and sound across cuts in Renaldo and Clara, rather than cutting completely between scenes and their soundtracks in Eat the Document, “dazzles in its complexity.” Smith implies that this is a significant advance from the earlier film (60). Smith tells us that Renaldo and Clara is about “Dylan’s struggle to achieve a balance between his personal and professional lives,” and Smith focuses his attention on moments of “emotional nakedness” in the film. In doing so, the study privileges a biographical framework for understanding Renaldo and Clara.
His example is the scene from the film in which Joan Baez (as the Woman in White) “holds a red carnation and watches as Dylan/Renaldo and Sara/Clara awkwardly attempt to make love” (64). The slash marks in this sentence link and disassociate the autobiographical and the fictional. Despite the purported “emotional nakedness” of the scene, there is a meta-theatrical frame. The film’s play with personas in some way militates against Smith’s reading of this scene and its prioritizing of its biographical resonances. The push-and-pull between the fictional and the autobiographical—a tension between a Fellini-esque self-referential theatricalism and the legacy of verité documentary—perplexes viewers of Renaldo and Clara to this day.
Smith is on firm ground when writing about Masked and Anonymous. The script (co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles) has as an explicit thematic focus the legacy of 1960s idealism and the decay of the American republic. Smith writes that “Dylan and Charles’s script, unsurprisingly, contains many allusions to and quotations from a raft of literary sources” (86). The legacy of Godard, though unmentioned here, still pertains, as many of Godard’s films explicitly interpolate literary references. The major difference lies in the way that Dylan’s appropriations are woven into the script, the “borrowed” phrases and language giving the extended lengths of dialogue a uniformly antiquated and poetic register. In his discussion of Dylan’s compositional methods, Smith quotes Larry Charles saying Dylan brought him a box of notes and quotes scribbled on hotel stationery. In piecing together these fragments, the two writers attempted to capture Dylan’s impression of America’s descent into a kleptocracy that nullifies the idealism purportedly attending the iconic past of Jake Fate/Bob Dylan. Smith is correct to see in Masked and Anonymous not only an extension of Dylan’s allusive and appropriative songwriting style, but also a prescient foreshadowing of the current political climate in the United States.
Such political concerns register in Smith’s study when they touch on Dylan’s status as an icon of the 1960s. “The most important references [in Masked and Anonymous] are those made to Dylan’s own career” writes Smith (97). He explores the way Masked and Anonymous critiques the cultural iconography surrounding the creation of “Bob Dylan.” But we can find a point of critical tension here: Smith does not analyze the history that Dylan is exploring in the film script. The focus remains fixed on Dylan’s career narrative. For many readers, this will be a helpful frame for beginning to understand the movie. However, for readers long familiar with Dylan’s biography, it may be that it is precisely the imbrication of history and Dylan’s career—a dialectic that has always been present in Dylan’s cinematic work—that seems the matter of this movie.
The suggestive manner in which Smith raises these ways of critically framing the movie offers the interested reader a path of return to this strange and wonderful film. In Smith’s reading, however, the transition away from the socio-historical contexts that Dylan and Charles are playing with in alluding to Dylan as a cultural legend leaves a reader in familiar territory. No doubt the film plays with that legend, but it is a legend that the script places in a variety of American historical and political contexts, something Dylan’s allusive songwriting style does as well. In a book that embeds the films in the context of the time of their making, we do not find a link between the formal daringness of Masked and Anonymous and the critique of American history that dominates the film’s thematic focus. How does it feel to be Bob Dylan? We gain a sense of how the films express this question in Smith’s book. How does it feel to be an American in the 21st century? This is a question that seems pertinent to Masked and Anonymous, but it is a question a reader is left to answer on their own.
Smith does offer an insight, however, into Masked and Anonymous’s sometimes overwhelming panoply of random characters. He zeros in on the emotional bond between Luke Wilson’s Bobby Cupid character and that of Dylan’s Jack Fate, writing, “The warmth and affection between these two characters, in stark contrast to all of the other relationships depicted, which seem based on exploitation, is key to understanding the agenda of Masked and Anonymous” (98). This is a good way of winnowing down the gallery of odd characters that Dylan, more like a ventriloquist, feeds his lines through. The tension between the Fate/Cupid relationship could have been explored more fully, but again, this framework gives a newcomer to the field a clear sense of the movie’s drama. Smith writes that “Jack Fate is the calm in the eye of the [movie’s] storm, a blank slate upon which others project their insanity, and Charles gets a lot of comic mileage from the contrast between Dylan’s deadpan delivery and the over-the-top performances of everyone else” (100). Despite the mixing of metaphors, seeing Dylan’s affected stiffness as a feature of the movie and not a bug is an interesting argument. He shows how Dylan and Charles use meta-theatricality to explore, rather than critique, the emotions of the main characters: “It’s as if [Charles, as director of the film] took a Humphrey Bogart character out of the 1940s and plunked him down in the middle of a massively absurd science-fiction landscape—the resignation and world-weariness of the stoic film noir hero remain amusingly intact” (100). This summation accounts for the way both Dylan and Charles shaped the script and, from such shaping, the way Charles’s direction remains true to the guiding themes and forms of late-era Dylan. Smith argues that the film is skeptical about the role of the artist in society and the ways in which even era-defining art, such as Dylan’s music, fails to affect social change. Nevertheless, continuing to create in the face of such skepticism ultimately defines Dylan’s work not only in this film, but in his music.
In the latter portion of the book, Smith takes up three films that do not bear the artistic imprint of Dylan per se, but which carry his imprimatur. In writing on The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, Shadow Kingdom, and the big budget Hollywood film A Complete Unknown, Smith notes these films variously curate the myth of “Bob Dylan.” In doing so, the book reflects on how this trio of films link to that abiding skepticism at the heart of Masked and Anonymous.
Scorsese’s second Dylan documentary infamously includes a whole series of fabricated legends and stories about the Rolling Thunder Revue voiced through actors performing the role of “witnesses” to the tour. As Smith puts it, since “the Rolling Thunder Revue tour . . . was all about masks and disguises—including Joan Baez doing a convincing stint in full Bob Dylan drag—Scorsese figured the best way for him to capture the true ‘spirit’ of that tour was for the film itself to wear a disguise” (119). Rather than trying to right the historical record, as many critical commentators of the film attempted to do, Smith wisely takes these meta-theatrical gestures on their own terms. The result is a sense of this film as decidedly unsentimental; Scorsese’s fictional embellishments, with which Dylan gamely plays along, are not ancillary ornaments to a standard rock doc, but make the film into something which probes the sources of our fascination with Dylan and the legends that have accrued around his career. No critic has pointed out, as Smith does, that this film (in which Dylan speaks to the camera in a “documentary interview mode” about made up characters and fictional scenarios) contains perhaps some of Dylan’s best acting. Hitting again on an insight about this “documentary film,” Smith avers that “Scorsese ultimately turns the whole project into a fantasia about this American yearning” for redemption (125). The yearning of Dylan fans to see the restored segments of full Rolling Thunder performances seems, in Smith’s writing, to include the historical frame Scorsese overlays upon the film. “This American yearning for redemption” (a phrase Anne Waldman speaks in one of the film’s interviews) is a desire for an original in a land of false promises and phony commodities. It is a yearning for an origin story which can lend the present meaning.
Shadow Kingdom is linked to “Love and Theft”, according to Smith, because its recording in 2001, Dylan was playing around with the idea of a fictional documentary about the making of the album. While it is beyond the purview of Smith’s book to tease out an understanding about the use to which Dylan works imposture, recycling, and repurposing into the album and the “concert film” Shadow Kingdom, we nevertheless find Dylan once again turning to film in order to shape his legacy or influence the myths which have accrued around this figure, “Bob Dylan.” The film does so in a way that complicates viewers’ assumptions about the typically “seamless” work of the concert film genre that puts a spectator “in the room” during the performance.
In an inspired connection, Smith compares the “roadhouse” performance sections from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return and the “roadhouse” milieu of the “Bon Bon Club” that is the fictional setting for Shadow Kingdom. He writes that the most memorable episode in Lynch’s return to the world of Twin Peaks, “the genuinely avant-garde” eighth episode, “was shot in high-contrast black and white and posited that the birth of rock ‘n’ roll was explicitly linked to the creation of the atomic bomb. Dylan had likewise spoken of early rock ‘n’ roll as being ‘atom bomb fueled’ . . . and ‘atomic powered, all zoom and doom’” (134). The threading of rock ‘n’ roll’s emancipatory power with the nullifying power of the atomic bomb links the “American yearning” that suffuses The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story and Lynch’s brand of American surrealism.
In the last portion of the book, Smith analyzes A Complete Unknown by piecing together extracts from various interviews with writers, James Mangold the director, and other actors. Here the theme of loneliness comes to the surface: Mangold’s film, the book argues, expresses the strangely paradoxical place Dylan found himself in, as a genius beloved by many for his work who also remained at a distance from those adoring fans. It is interesting, then, that Dylan chose to represent his development as a songwriter in a very traditional Hollywood musical biopic instead of something more exciting and illuminating as I’m Not There, another film that deconstructs (while celebrating) the Dylan mythos.
Smith picks up the theme of the alienated artistic self to contrast A Complete Unknown with Todd Haynes’s movie. In Smith’s assessment of A Complete Unknown, the movie’s ability to tap into an audience’s affective response to its formulaic structure makes Mangold’s film an apt vehicle for conveying Dylan’s essential solitude. “Dylan is ultimately unknowable” writes Smith about A Complete Unknown: “His transition to rock ‘n’ roll may have been an artistic triumph, but the man himself remains cloaked in a mysterious sadness” (150). It’s a virtue of this melodrama, for Smith, that such emotional connection to the story of Dylan’s diligent iconoclasm exists in a film where the protagonist remains at arm’s length, a figure out of myth and legend whose essence slips our grasp while his music remains indelible.
The musical set pieces in A Complete Unknown (like the concert performances cut up in Eat the Document and found throughout Renaldo and Clara) are central to the film for Smith. In these scenes, he finds that the director James Mangold advances the plot, develops the characters’ relationships, and displays the power of Dylan’s musical genius. “The best example of this,” writes Smith, “is probably the virtuoso sequence where Dylan performs ‘Masters of War’ in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis while Greenwich Village denizens are glued to their TV sets in their apartments nearby. Which is also the exact moment Baez falls in love with Dylan. The music is not just the backdrop to the story; it is the story” (149). Smith’s argument is that in the genre of the Hollywood biopic, the power of the musical performances interweaves most seamlessly with the narrative thrust of the film.
Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think is best understood as a resource for those undertaking a fully engaged screening of Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, or Masked and Anonymous. Smith’s work is valuable since it considers the production history of these films and their cinematic precedents. After reading this book, one should not turn to these films as sources for galvanizing performance clips, as Dylan fans and scholars, one assumes, have already done. Smith’s book begins the work of seriously evaluating these films on their own cinematic terms. The book offers a set of appendices that trace Dylan’s references to movies in his non-cinematic work, going beyond a mere filmography to indicate Dylan’s movie references in everything from his music videos, his songs, and select episodes of the Theme Time Radio Hour. Rather than pro forma additions to the text, they give us the tools to begin seeing these films with new eyes and with the conviction that Dylan is immersed in the iconography and the visual language of film.
