Scorsese scores with documentary of Bob Dylan
Halfway through Martin Scorsese’s enthralling new film “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” Irish folk singer Liam Clancy talks about the Dylan he knew – or, more precisely, didn’t really know:
“In old Irish mythology, they talk about shape changers. Dylan changed voices. He changed images. It wasn’t really necessary for him to be a definitive person. He was a receiver. He was possessed and he articulated what the rest of us wanted to say but couldn’t say.”
Of all the truly iconic figures in modern American pop culture, Dylan, even now at age 64, is the most elusive – as an artist and a human being.
He has cloaked his life and his 35-year career in a carefully constructed mystique; he constantly surprises and mystifies. He is such a master manipulator of his own image that the Dylan of one moment is not the Dylan of the next.
Dylan himself says – in a moment of clarity rare to his often inscrutable public statements – that he learned early in his career “not to give away too easily anything that was dear to me.”
All of which makes Scorsese’s 3 1/2 -hour film, airing Monday and Tuesday nights on PBS, such an extraordinary piece of work.
Focusing on Dylan as the young, emerging artist – roughly the time from his arrival in New York City in the winter of 1961 to his motorcycle accident outside Woodstock in 1966, generally regarded as his most creative period – “No Direction Home” manages to capture the essence of Dylan, a measure of his evolving personality and, certainly, the power of his work from that time.
It is not a true documentary. Plenty of loose ends are left dangling and questions are left unanswered. Some of Dylan’s most obvious flaws – his drug use during the time, his misuse of friends – are implied rather than explored.
And “No Direction Home” doesn’t acknowledge the control Dylan had over the film. His manager, Jeff Rosen, is not only an executive producer but also conducted the interview with Dylan that is the film’s centerpiece.
Still, Scorsese triumphs over all of that.
While the filmmaker is best known for his dramas, from “Mean Streets” through “Raging Bull” to “The Aviator,” Scorsese is a passionate observer of popular music. He edited “Woodstock,” directed “The Last Waltz” with the Band and produced “The Blues,” the innovative PBS miniseries on that musical genre.
His love of music shines through “No Direction Home.” Working with riveting archival film footage – notably extensive outtakes from D.A. Pennebaker’s rarely seen “Eat the Document” – and some refreshingly candid interviews with those who knew Dylan, Scorsese has managed to craft a vivid, intimate epic about an enormously influential artist.
Scorsese sticks exclusively to the five-year period of the 1960s when Dylan assumed and discarded musical personas at a startling rate even for him, going from derivative folkie to oracle of the protest generation to visionary poet to charismatic rocker.
It was an extraordinary burst of creativity, during which he recorded his defining albums (“Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Blonde On Blonde”) and songs for the ages (“Like A Rolling Stone,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “The Times They Are A’Changin’ “).
In “No Direction Home,” Dylan terms himself a “musical expeditionary,” adding: “I was in a certain arena artistically that no one else had ever been in before, ever.”
But folk singer Tony Glover strikes a chord when he calls Dylan “a sponge,” someone who absorbed the best of artists ranging from Hank Williams and Webb Pierce to Woody Guthrie and Gene Vincent – and then moved on to something totally different.
“I’d taken all the elements that I’ve ever known to make wide, sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling that was the essence of the spirit of the times,” Dylan acknowledges in the film.
The greatness of those years comes through in the live performances that provide the driving force for “No Direction Home.”
Scorsese opens and closes the film with a corrosive version of “Like A Rolling Stone” from Dylan’s 1966 European tour with the Hawks (later the Band), a contentious, draining road trip where his new electronic work drew boos and hoots.
In between are substantial clips of Dylan in development: playing “Man of Constant Sorrow” on a 1963 TV show, doing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, mystifying an audience with “Mr. Tambourine Man” at a “topical song” workshop, singing “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at a civil rights rally.
There’s also significant time given to the 1965 Newport festival when Dylan plugged in and rampaged through “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like A Rolling Stone,” to the dismay of such traditionalists as Pete Seeger and much of the audience.
Exactly what happened that night – and just how vehement the response was – is as murky in “No Direction Home” as it always has been in the Dylan legend. But it’s rather funny how people’s memories are so radically different, particularly about whether Seeger threatened to cut the power with an ax.
Sprinkled through are pungent comments from Dylan, who – as he did in his autobiography “Chronicles: Volume One,” just out in trade paperback (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $14) – seems to be a bit more willing to reveal himself than he has in the past.
“An artist has to be careful to never think that he’s arrived somewhere,” he suggests at one point. “He has to be in a constant state of becoming.”
But the best, most insightful bits come from others. Folk singer Clancy spins some delightful tales from Dylan’s Greenwich Village days. There’s a rare and thoughtful interview with Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s longtime lover. (She’s the young woman with him on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”)
Singer Dave Van Ronk (who died in 2002) talks about how Dylan stole his arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun,” only to have Eric Burdon and the Animals steal it from him and turn it into a hit.
Most of all, there are the amusingly acerbic words of Joan Baez, whose complex artistic and personal relationship with Dylan over the years is one of contemporary music’s greatest soap operas.
Listening to the Baez of today, you realize that Dylan was her greatest inspiration, musically and emotionally, and also her greatest disappointment.
“I don’t know to this day what he’s all about,” she says near the end of the film. “All I know is what he gave us.”