Culture | Back Story

Performing in a cinema near you: Bob Dylan and Maria Callas

Behind the boom in musical biopics

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown
Photograph: Searchlight Pictures

Everyone knows a genius when they see one. At least they do in biopics. In “A Complete Unknown”, a young Bob Dylan rocks up at the hospital that is treating Woody Guthrie, and instantly Guthrie and Pete Seeger, another folk-music patriarch, recognise he is the real deal. In “Maria”, even a sweating Nazi officer in wartime Athens, for whom a callow Maria Callas is forced to sing, gawps at her talent.

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