There is certainly no dearth of films derived from the work of Nobel Prize-winning authors, and there are even some notable instances of the authors doing that transposing themselves, from George Bernard Shaw with Pygmalion (1938) to Imre Kertész with Fateless (2005). (The notoriously Nobel-snubbed Nabokov would have joined this company with his screenplay for Kubrick’s Lolita [1962].) Rarer by far, however, are those laureates who have created works directly for the screen, a particularly distinguished list that includes Kawabata Yasunari (A Page of Madness, 1926), Samuel Beckett (Film, 1963), Patrick Modiano (Lacombe, Lucien, 1974)—and, now, Bob Dylan, newly and controversially feted by the Swedish Academy. Unlike his fellows on that list, of course, Dylan is not (primarily) a novelist or playwright but a songwriter, and as a filmmaker—well, as…