8 Bob Dylan Movies to Remember on His 70th Birthday

6. Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Dylan co-wrote the part-satire/part-vanity project/all-nonsense Masked and Anonymous with director Larry Charles, also starring as an ex-con enlisted to headline a benefit concert organized under shady circumstances in the early stages of a country's civil war. Yeah. Despite a kind of mind-blowing cast that included Jessica Lange, Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Penélope Cruz, this one was DOA both critically (the NY Post's Lou Lumenick called it "a strong contender for the worst movie of the century"; clearly he never saw Hearts of Fire) and commercially (earning only $533,000 in five months of limited theatrical release). It has its fans, though -- and a scene-stealing turn for the ages from Val Kilmer:

7. No Direction Home (2005)

Where Dont Look Back, Eat the Document and later nonfiction Dylan films represented fragments of his evolving career and persona, Martin Scorsese sprawling documentary provided Bob Dylan in full. Take Dylan or leave him, but as a cinematic tour through his half-century of musical and cultural history, the profound No Direction Home has no peer.

8. I'm Not There (2007)

Finally, with his 2007 film I'm Not There, writer-director Todd Haynes took the radical step of telling Dylan's story with seven different actors playing variations on the singer-songwriter's mystique more than playing the singer himself. One of them, Cate Blanchett, earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance, making her the first and only (and probably last, honestly) Oscar-winner to be nominated for another Oscar for playing another Oscar-winner. (Dylan's contribution to the Wonder Boys soundtrack, "Things Have Changed," won Best Original Song in 2000.) More than 40 years after Dylan tore up the UK in Dont Look Back, Haynes and Blanchett paid homage to that film's arrogant, strung-out, journo-thrashing legend -- as well as his sociopolitical influence in the mid-'60s. Happy birthday, Bob!

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