The idea of making a movie out of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks is ludicrous, and not just because the brilliant, weird movie I’m Not There already burned through all the best, most inventive ideas for who could possibly play Bob Dylan. If you do Blood on the Tracks as a straight narrative of a relationship breaking down, reducing the music to background atmospherics, you lose all the weird brilliance of the world Dylan’s created. And if you try to od it as a series of short vignettes, it’s hard to think how the narrative might work. But as long as this thing’s in the works anyway, here are five ideas for who should play some of the more entertaining characters on Dylan’s album:

-The Ex-Husband from “Tangled Up in Blue”: If “she was married when we first met / soon to be divorced,” it’s worth remembering that someone else got their heart broken before Dylan’s operatic love story even got kickstarted. John Hawkes is awfully good at portraying hope that expects to be disappointed, whether as Sol Star on Deadwood or paralyzed journalist Mark O’Brien in The Surrogate, about a paralyzed man who decides to lose his virginity, which will be major Oscar-bait when it comes out later this year. If anyone deserves to be in proximity to Bob Dylan, it’s him.

-The Parrot from “Simple Twist of Fate”: If the parrot from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is available, he’s definitely put in enough time in the background on a goofy project. Now’s his time to prove that he’s an artist.

-Mrs. Gray from “Idiot Wind”: Now that the American Pie franchise has come to a conclusion, Jennifer Coolidge is free from the obligations of obligations of playing Stifler’s mom. But she could put that experience to good use playing a sexy widow who runs off to Italy with someone inappropriate and an enormous amount of money. Maybe Eugene Levy can play Mr. Gray, who gets shot. Those eyebrows are great at conveying surprise.

-Lily, from “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”: Emma Stone got famous as a redhead, only to reveal that her natural hair color was actually blonde. So who better to play a gorgeous frontier girl who switches hair color as part of a life transformation. She’d be awesome in an adaptation of the most epic song on “Blood on the Tracks.” And now that David Milch is available, maybe he could dust himself off and go back to the frontier well. I would totally watch this as a stand-alone movie.

-The message-deliverer from “If You See Her, Say Hello”: It has to be pretty stressful being the go-between for Bob Dylan and a woman he’s broken up with. But Adam Pally deserves a European vacation after all the awesome work he’s put in on Happy Endings this year. And any awkward news is more palatable when delivered by a man who’s in full-on bear mode.

It doesn’t actually seem likely that Dylan will win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but given how dense and narrative his lyrics are, I’m glad he’s getting actual buzz for it. Here are five Dylan songs that make the case that he’s as much a short-story writer as a musician:

1. “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (1964): Many recent laureates have won for work that exposes injustice or examines the impact of oppression. The subject of Dylan’s stark description of racial violence may have protested its accuracy during his lifetime, but the song endures as a biting indictment of a system that values some deaths more than others.

2. “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” (1966): Dylan’s view of Mobile as a shot-up, burned out, gorgeous ghost town full of mythic figures would be an amazing first chapter for a Southern Gothic novel.

3. “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (1975): Until Deadwood came along, one of the best Westerns about women. The little detail about Lily washing the dye out of her hair is particularly beautiful.

4. “Desolation Row” (1965): It’s not as if Dylan was the first person to re-appropriate fairy tale characters and juxtapose them in new and striking ways. But “Desolation Row” smashes together archetypes, immortal characters from literature, poets, and Albert Einstein and puts them up against the barricades of the riot police in a striking take on the first half of the twentieth century that’s a prescient prediction of the second:

5. “My Back Pages” (1964): Even his songs about disillusionment and artistic transition are great.

Actually, with couplets that tack on an extra syllable past the rhyme, like “I’m the grandson of a man nothing less than legendary / That’s a lot of pressure so I Berry Gordy,” he’s kind of got a Parks and Recreation Jean-Ralphio thing going on, right?

In any case, laying down standard hip-hop braggadocio like, “I am very Motown / Bitch, I’mma get that crown / While I’m at it I might reinvent sound,” is always sort of dangerous when you’re 15, and doubly so when your grandfather is Bob Dylan. Jakob Dylan, at least, always seemed to know that he was middling and to be comfortable with that, though “It’s where I’m from that lets them think I’m a whore / I’m an educated virgin” is a pretty great winsome line that acknowledges his background:

But seriously, couldn’t one of these dudes be, like, a pioneering heart surgeon or NASA astronaunt or something? I feel like it would make family holidays a lot less awkward if there were fewer, “Grandpa, what did you think of my mixtape” conversations.

The weather’s deeply insane in Washington, and I’m spending a bunch of the day inside a theater watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (the sacrifices I make for this job). So in honor of the brain-melting heat and to keep you amused while I’m gone, a playlist of gender-flipped covers, where the singer of the cover is different than the gender of the person who originated the song.

1. Xiu Xiu’s awesomely creepy-sounding cover of Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World),” which inspired me.

2. Nothing beats the fragile version of “God Only Knows,” that the Beach Boys laid down on their “Live in London” album. But Petra Haden’s version has a lovely serenity to it:

3. And where Haden brings calm to the Beach Boys, Dolly Parton adds a nervous energy to the Beatles’ “Help”:

4. While in turn, Sisters of Mercy turn “Jolene” into a horror movie (HT: Zack Stentz):

Having spent some time in 1960s Minnesota with A Serious Man, it sounds like the Coen brothers are headed to the big city to make a movie about Dave Van Ronk, the guitarist and political activist who helped define the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. I really enjoyed I’m Not There, particularly the Jack Rollins section, which I thought did a concise if somewhat opaque job of tracing Bob Dylan’s role in the civil rights movement and his impulse to blow up his affiliations with the folks who wanted to use him as a symbol and a vehicle for message delivery:

So it’ll be interesting to see how the Coens approach Van Ronk’s politics, his music, and his role as a connector and mentor to folks in the scene. I imagine that last piece will be key to how the movie turns out. Van Ronk was an interesting guy in his own right, enough of a sci-fi fan to write for fanzines (an issue of eI is dedicated to him), one of the folks who got arrested at the Stonewall Riots, which he apparently sort of meandered into, a host of dinners for musicians, and wildly ecclectic when it came to the music that he loved. He was also, if his music is any indication, a fun guy to be around:

So the movie can focus on him, which I think I might find more interesting (and which might be more explicitly political). Or his perspective can be the lens through which we see an array of no doubt very accomplished actors impersonating everyone from Suzanne Vega, to Janis Ian, to Odetta (who apparently was the person who got him performing). If they go that route, I wonder how you cut Dylan down to size enough to fit, to be part of the context, to be someone Robert Christgau believes was influenced by Van Ronk rather than the mountain casting a shadow over a half-century of American music that he eventually became.