No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

I won't say - Thank you Scorsese, I'll say - Thank you Dylan. I wasn't aware you had all that humor as a young man (and still): - How many protest singers? - 136. And this reporter don't get it, even though people are laughing: - Do you mean exactly 136, or ca 136?? And so on.

Of course I love Dylan's music, his singing voice, his words (I've read his poems, and the novel Tarantula, no wonder he has been suggested for the Nobel Prize in literature more than once).

But this film, then, it's not just about Dylan, it's about how humanity evolved on this planet in the decade we call the sixties. There's so many voices in this movie, I learned so much: - Who is she? - Who is he? - What was that? .. and so on. And searching the internet I found out a great deal, and so got inspired to find out even more.. and so on..

..I'm glad to be alive, thank you all, thank you Scorsese, thank you Zimmerman, Gunnn, Dylan, whatever...

Ola, Norway

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Martin Scorcese makes another visually stunning film, and paints Dylan in a way nobody else could have. Instead of being asked stupid questions by stupid journalists, Dylan has a camera put in front of him and he just speaks. He's got a bit of a schedule, but he does what he wants with it. I really don't have words for how this movie made me feel. The sheer passion behind it just fueled my fierce love for Dylan even more.

The live bootlegs and behind-stage clips give a wonderful insight into Dylan's world. He is a man who just emanates coolness like it was the way he was born. It seems like nobody can ever have the upper hand on this man, and it's truly a delight to watch.

Beautiful.

Well, it took a director as great as Martin Scorsese and 45 years of recording, travelling, ramblin' and bein' busy bein' born instead of dyin', but at long last Dylan fans from Dharma to Duluth have a glimpse behind the genius in the dark sunglasses. A remarkable film--for so many reasons that it would take at least 3 1/2 hours (the length of the movie) to list them--but the main reasons anyone with an interest in His Bobness needs to view this film are as follows: 1) Scorsese's direction: Almost 30 years after he chronicled the passing of a musical era with his magnificent film The Last Waltz, Scorsese once again captures musical brilliance and history on film as only someone who truly appreciates Dylan's historical as well as cultural influence could. A Master Director chronicles a Master Musician. 2) Archival footage of everyone you never saw before on film, including Gene Vincent, Hank Williams, and early 60's Greenwich Village pioneers aplenty and of course.. 3) Bob. For reasons known only to himself, Dylan actually speaks on record about his least favorite topic, himself. Along with last year's autobiography, this film reveals far more of the portrait of the artist as a young man than could ever have been anticipated given Bob's notorious closed-mouthed history on his own history.

With Elvis, Ray Charles and John Lennon gone, there are few--if ANY--artists whose historical and musical importance even come near that of Bob Dylan. In No Direction Home, we see as much, if not more, than we are entitled to see about how and why young Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, MN became the most important songwriter of the 20th century.

He's got everything he needs--he's an artist--but just this once, he DOES look back.

There's good about this. It is extremely well done. It is endowed with a breath as film, and I suppose we can credit Steve Jobs with assuring that only first class talent was used. Among that talent was Scorsese, a master, certainly in the act of shaping something with a natural rhythm.

That competence makes this absolutely essential viewing. I am not putting it on my essential films list because as a film it doesn't merit it. But if you, dear reader, were not there, actually there as part of the events depicted, you need to see this as a social document. The world then was as different to now in the flows of energy than any other time in the past 500 years is from now,

And this man was every bit as powerful as this hints. More, and that's part of the problem.

The problem is that Scorsese decided to make an understandable story. So he pruned and pruned and pruned until what was left depicts a recognizable arc with extreme clarity, so clear it appears as if the life were invented for this telling.

And sure enough, we get a crisp story about a man who insinuated himself into a Greenwich Village crowd, and absorbed the poetic beat flavor of the time but not the fecklessness. He adopted the guise of a protest singer to get his foot in the door, then assumed the role for many years as our premier poet.

Martin brings us three acts: boy to New York and maturity, Bobby to eminence as a folksinger, Dylan's adventures in rock in spite of adversity. Perhaps the first act isn't as clean because the footage feels more like real history instead of a scripted life.

No mention is made of drugs, or his family (though "Visions of Johanna" is featured). Nothing of his well known exploits with multiple mystical cosmologies. No sex at all. No Beatles or Brian Wilson. All elided in the name of clarity. Well, fine.

And the thing only addresses the first couple really interesting years and avoids the next six or seven where he pounded us with changes and challenges far exceeding those depicted here.

I am reviewing everything there is of Dylan for the upcoming "I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan" which will feature both Cate and Julianne. It should be something special, something challenging and not artificially straightened like this is.

Until then, view this not as Scorsese intended, or as the confused audiences he goes to extremes to depict. Try to view this as someone who was engaged at the time, someone who knew that stronger constructions than "we shall overcome" would be needed to negotiate a way through the world of human brambles and flowers. Try to actually submerse yourself in the art and forget the story of the artist as he would have had it at the time.

It could still save you.

Or if not, look at this as a film which presented Scorsese with a huge problem. Here we have a brilliant young man of whose singular brilliance all the interviewees attest. And then we have recent interviews with the man himself, dull, inarticulate, even stupid. The conventional shaping of the thing would explain by saying he destroyed his gift through drugs and related excesses like fundamentalist religion.

That would be the obvious route, but it complicates the story Scorsese wants to tell. It complicates it simply, because Marty has another image in mind. And it would complicate it indirectly because then you'd have a simple success, drugs, redemption storyspine that you'd have to escape.

So what to do? The solution is to build in a long, otherwise irrelevant stream of press interviews where stupid questions are asked over and over. Stupid, always stupid ones and when faces are shown, it is clear they are those of dolts. Then the recent interview footage of Dylan is tied to that. Surely we don't expect answers to similar questions. It is the choice of a master storyteller to channel our curiosity so. It makes for a clean, Scorsese-type character map.

But if you weren't there, it will cheat you out of the ambiguities and complexities of the real story and that you can find in any Dylan song from "Tambourine Man" to "Lily and the Jack of Hearts."

Still, watch it. But do so lucidly. We can only hope that Jobs wants to tell the rest of the story.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

In our age of universal celebrity, where we know everything that everyone famous thinks (or, more usually, does not think), it's refreshing to rediscover how interesting it can be to hear from someone whose achievements are great but who rarely speaks about them. Bob Dylan has given an extensive interview to Martin Scorcese for Scorcese's film about his emergence from the folk scene and his subsequent "betrayal" of that scene when he went electric: it's absorbing to watch, although, in the end, Bob doesn't actually say that much specific. However, the interview is complemented by a selection of other distinguished talking heads and most crucially, a rich selection of archive footage, going back to Dylan's very first days as a performer. What one notices is just how young he was: the depth and sophistication of even his earliest music can blind one, listening on record, to the age of the performer producing it. He also comes across as playful, self-confident and quite naturally baffled by some of idiocy going on around him: far from seeming incomprehensibly moody, Dylan actually appears as sane as anyone could be at the centre of such attention. It's the music, though, that is really the key to this film, with a rawness and edge, as well as a cleverness, that is still unsurpassed today (and this comment applies equally to the acoustic and the electric material). Since 1966 when the film ends, Dylan has continued to tour and write occasionally great songs; but the body of work that he produced in the early to mid 1960s stands clear for its amazing quantity and quality. If nothing else, 'No Direction Home' stands as clear testament to that achievement.