A Guide to 10 Films

Unlike many of us, Bob Dylan isn’t a huge fan of binge watching movies.

“Two or three hours in front of the tube is a lot of binge watching for me,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2022. “Too much time to be involved with the screen. Or maybe I’m too old for it.”

But that doesn’t mean he’s not a cinephile. He’s cited numerous filmmakers and actors over the years as influences on his own work, including Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin and John Ford, to name just a few.

He himself has dipped his toes in the water of movie-making, appearing in both fictional films and ones about himself.

“In one way I don’t consider myself a filmmaker at all. In another way I do,” he told Rolling Stone in 1978, speaking about the movie Renaldo and Clara, a four-hour, quasi-documentary film he directed and starred in. “I don’t know who will like it. I made it for a specific bunch of people and myself, and that’s all. That’s how I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind‘ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” – they were written for a certain crowd of people and for certain artists, too. Who knew they were going to be big songs?”

As with many of Dylan’s projects, commercial success, at least in the traditional definition of it, was not the goal.

“I don’t have any cinematic vision to sell out,” he said then. “It’s all for me so I can’t sell out. I’m not working for anybody. What was there to sell out?”

Renaldo and Clara is just one of several movie releases that Dylan has in some way had a hand in. In December of 2024, a new Dylan biopic arrived in the form of A Complete Unknown starring Timothee Chalamet as the young singer-songwriter who moves from Minnesota to New York City, finding himself along the way.

But there’s much more to be seen. In the below gallery, you’ll find a guide to 10 other Dylan-related films that have either focused on him as the subject or had some direct involvement with Dylan himself.