No Direction Home: Bob Dylan [2005] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

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Documenting Bob Dylan's glory years, 1941-1966.......2005-09-24

I was out on the deck cooking a steak and listening to Bob Dylan playing down in Bayfront Park when between songs he pointed out to the crowd that he had been born here in the Zenith City in a hospital on the side of the hill. This was the second time that Dylan had played Duluth, and the fact that he acknowledged this is the city of his birth was seen as icing on the cake because most of us were surprised he would ever come back here to play. That is because the man born Robert Zimmerman has been running from northern Minnesota pretty much since the day he graduated from Hibbing High School.

The title of "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" emphasizes that the singer-songwriter was a construct and attempts to chronicle the transformation from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. The key influence has always been considered to be Woody Guthrie, and Dylan's visit to Guthrie in the hospital is an iconic Sixties vision quest, but this documentary is able to work in many more names into the mix. The connections to the music at any time during the early stages of Dylan's career are only addressed tangentially, but that only underscores that this is not a music appreciation course on Bob Dylan, as much as that would be nice. This is an attempt to preserve the extant record on the first quarter century of Dylan's life, with an emphasize on the five years at the end of that period that represent the most creative and significant portion of his career, aided and abetted by talking heads the likes of Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Liam Clancy, and Al Kooper, who provide memories and retrospective insights (Kooper's story on how he ended up playing the organ on "Like a Rolling Stone" is a testament to serendipity in the music business).

Since Martin Scorsese was basically given 10 hours of film footage to shape into a four-hour documentary, the sense in which he served as "director" of "No Direction Home" would be in laying out the basic structure for film editor David Tedeschi. Obviously the main thrust of the documentary is the chronology of Dylan's life, which mixes archival footage with contemporary interviews. But this narrative plays out against Dylan's 1966 tour of Great Britain, already the focus of D.A. Pennebaker's documentary "Don't Look Back," during which he offended a large segment of his fans by picking up an electric guitar. Night after night Dylan would play an acoustic set to raves from his audience, and then return with a backing band for an electric set. Time and time again you hear audience members scream "Judas" and other insults, while Dylan tells the bad to just play louder. The main narrative and the subtext come together when Dylan shows up at the Newport Folk Festival supported by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and shocks the world. The U.K. tour kept the wound open and it was the motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966 that turned Dylan into a recluse that adds the exclamation point on the

One of the things that resulted from that decision was the song that "Rolling Stone" magazine picked as the top rock song of all-time, "Like a Rolling Stone," which also happened to be the first single Dylan ever released (it went to #2 on the Billboard charts). This was taken as clear evidence that Dylan was going "commercial," yet even the fans who booed and shouted curses when Dylan came on stage with the Band (nee the Hawks), applauded that one song. The problem was not that Dylan was becoming commercial ("Eve of Destruction" was a #1 song and that did not hurt Barry McGuire's bona fides as a folk rebel), but that for the most part he appeared to be giving up being the voice of his generation. In that regard the biggest slap in the face to those who worshipped him was not "Like a Rolling Stone," with its powerful onslaught of pointed lyrics, but "Mr. Tambourine Man," which we see him performing at a folk song workshop, because that is not a song that is going to send young people to the streets let alone to the barricades.

The interviews done with Dylan are actually the least important part of "No Direction Home," because if there is anything we have learned from listening to Dylan over the past four decades it is to let the music speak for itself. In all of the footage from the first half of the Sixties showing Dylan talking with reporters he repeatedly dodges their questions. They want to know what the songs are about and he refuses to tell them. It might seem like he is waiting for somebody smart enough to pose a question worth answering, but I have to believe he would never play that game. This is a man who insisted he grew up in Gallup, New Mexico rather than admit to being from Hibbing, and his willingness to sit in front of a film camera and talk about his past does not automatically mean increased veracity. I would like to believe that when Dylan talks about the musicians he listened to growing up that he is telling the truth, but I always wary.

What is potentially the most illuminating thing that Dylan says about himself in this four-hour documentary is his insistence that he was never a topical songwriter. If you can wrap your mind about the truth in that obvious lie, which is possible if you keep in mind Dylan's contemporaries on the folk scene in the early Sixties and remember that sometimes words have two meanings, then you can arrive at a better understanding of the truth inherent in Dylan's music. "No Direction Home" does not fully illuminate Bob Dylan, but that impossibility is hardly Scorsese's agenda. Ultimately, Scorsese is making the case for why Dylan should end up getting a Noble Prize for Literature some day soon. The only better way to make the case is to simply listen to the man's music.

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