In 1965, Bob Dylan was the most fashionable musician in the world. Over the past 60 years, his critical and commercial appeal has fluctuated, but in the 21st century his acclaim has steadily increased in an unusual way for an ageing musician, capped with winning the 2016 Nobel prize in literature.

More surprisingly, he’s become hip again, not just with long-term followers but with younger listeners, many adding his music to their playlists for the first time. And he has recaptured the zeitgeist via the most unlikely of means for an enigmatic, grouchy eightysomething: taking up posting on X as others abandon it, and endorsing a biopic, A Complete Unknown, that celebrates the first few years of his career, and conceding – as he has rarely done before – that his past might be as important as his present or future.

During his last run of touring, concluding with three November shows at the Royal Albert Hall, he began posting a mixture of updates about life on the road and cultural commentary, all with a uniquely Dylanesque twist.

He mourned the recent passing of the comedian Bob Newhart (in July 2024 at the age of 94) and marked the anniversary of the demise of blues-harmonica player Paul Butterfield (in 1987 at the age of 44) – who may have been on his mind because the musician also played at the Newport folk festival, an important location in the new Dylan biopic. He told a fan asking what films he’d enjoyed recently that the best place to start was with the 1927 silent Lon Chaney circus melodrama, The Unknown.

Swinging through Germany, Dylan observed publishers at the Frankfurt book fair partying all night in his hotel, and complained that he couldn’t find the South African horror publisher Crystal Lake Publishing. He said he wanted to congratulate them on reprinting an 1894 book by Arthur Machen (a Welsh weird fiction author) and to offer them some of his short stories. In Paris, he enjoyed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds live, especially their new song Joy.

When a dancer claimed she’d once been told not to make eye contact with him, he dismissed this as ridiculous and said next time she should stare straight at him.

Dylan had a social media presence before, but it was maintained by his record label. These new posts were his authentic voice (even if his son Jakob was confused, telling the Boston Globe: “like most people, I can’t tell you what’s going on with those”). It fitted with the 21st-century Dylan, whose latest studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, has songs inspired by horror stories and feature him imagining himself as a mixture of Edgar Allan Poe, Indiana Jones and Anne Frank.

These interests alone are unlikely to have caught the attention of gen Z. But, like most celebrities, he was also using social media for promotion, telling followers to go see the new biopic. While appearing to have not yet watched James Mangold’s film, he endorsed the title (taken from Like a Rolling Stone, one of his most beloved songs), the film’s star Timothée Chalamet (“Timmy’s a brilliant actor”), and the 2015 book that inspired the film, Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!.

Wald’s book is not an obvious candidate for film adaptation, being largely a dry account of Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport folk festival, but it had caught the eye of Dylan’s management, who optioned it and approached directors.

In the last big Dylan biopic, 2007’s I’m Not There, he was played by six actors, including Cate Blanchett. This time, he’s played by one big star. Chalamet is known for his interests in art, fashion and film, but also the wide reach of his Instagram account (over 19 million followers). Dylan has always been a cinephile (albeit a wayward one, telling audiences that Sylvester Stallone’s 2019 Rambo film Last Blood deserved an Oscar) and appreciates actors, but is clearly as delighted by Chalamet’s ability to reach a young audience as he is by his impersonation.

Chalamet has a prankster spirit matching Dylan’s own. Wanting to win over diehards in his individual way, Chalamet has gone so deep in Dylan cosplay that it has expanded beyond the film and into his own life. When he showed up at the New York premiere of A Complete Unknown, he dressed not as the Dylan of the 1960s, when the film is set, but as Dylan in 2003, aping the clothes the singer wore to the Sundance film festival premiere of his movie Masked and Anonymous, in a beanie with blond-tipped hair and a riverboat gambler’s moustache.

The young actor knew little about Dylan when he accepted the role but embraced the singer’s lore with the same enthusiasm an actor playing a superhero might mine comic books, encouraging fans to follow suit.

Dylan has always kept diehards well-fed (last year saw a 27-CD boxset of recordings from his 1974 tour with the Band). While researching his role, Chalamet dug deep into past boxsets and unreleased recordings, focusing on studio chat as much as music.

Still, there’s more to this than Chalamet going method. He wasn’t the only one having fun with Dylan impersonations in 2024. Saturday Night Live star James Austin Johnson, who is known for impersonating Dylan in different eras and has a cameo in A Complete Unknown, ran a sketch on the Saturday show that was set at the film’s premiere, where his Dylan baffles Chalamet by talking about obscure sausages (in reality, Dylan skipped this screening).

Dylan is considered so important that there’s a centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma just for those who want to rifle through his past writings and recordings. Some fans are so obsessive they have bought his baby highchair and family home. But he is also a deeply eccentric song-and-dance-man who delights in provocation and playing with the past.

Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown, claimed Dylan wanted the film to contain one big lie, as with Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story in 2019, in which Sharon Stone pretended she had an affair with Dylan at 19. The obvious one is that it’s an audience member at the Newport folk festival who shouts “Judas!” when Dylan goes electric in the movie, as this really happened in Manchester, England, but the film is full of such elisions.

Will his new fans be able to see Dylan in the flesh, where he still does weird new things like accompanying his singing by tapping a tiny wrench on his microphone? Possibly. When he announced a tour for his much-admired Rough and Rowdy Ways album in 2021, it had a surprising quality for a man known for spending most of his time on the road: an end point.

Yes, this might mean that in 2025 he’ll start promoting something different, possibly a new album, but he is now 83 and suffers from debilitating vertigo. There was certainly a valedictory quality to the Royal Albert Hall performances that concluded the last tour, with audiences rapt as he wrought new shapes from his songs. But nothing on the final night indicated that Dylan was leaving his audiences for ever.

True, his performing life must stop one day, but as he has just spent last summer touring with country star Willie Nelson – eight years Dylan’s senior at 91 – his competitive spirit may carry him around the world a while longer yet.