Scorsese really serves more as a conductor this time out than a director. This is not Taxi Driver auteur territory. He gathers interviews with those close to Dylan, an immense amount of archival footage and old sound recordings and the works of other filmmakers who have documented Dylan's life into an overwhelming experience, a movie not just about the greatest American songwriter of the last century, but about American history and mythology, what this country says it means and what it actually stands for.
And the soundtrack kicks ass.
PBS is going to show this bad boy in two parts on September 26th and 27th, and I suggest you record it on your DVR or your TiVO or whatever it is that you use at your house to commit unwatchable, commercial-inundated "live" TV to digital media.
Or, you can watch it on DVD starting Tuesday.
As I said, it's an incredibly thoughtful, and extraordinarily dense document. Dylan's story is one about which I know the broad strokes - the lonely rural upbringing, the early love of country music and devotion to Woody Guthrie, the young life as a wandering "musical expeditionist," the intimate gigs at Greenwich Village coffee houses with Joan Baez and, of course, his eventual integration of rock and roll into his act, causing a rift within his audience.
What No Direction Home does isn't just re-tell this fable but attempt to see through it, not just to "the man behind the myth," but what mattered about the myth in the first place. Through contemporary interviews with Dylan himself, we can start to see his process, his creation of the persona of "Bob Dylan" from the inside out.
Dylan talks about his feelings of being born in the wrong era, how he relates to old-time "roots" music better than anything he hears on the radio. (We're shown a clip of Bing Crosby brightly performing "Accentuate the Positive" as an indication of what a young Dylan rejected about popular music). He decides to leave home, that Minnesota has done all it can for him, and to never look back, to give up on the very idea of having a history. He wants to make music of the kind that inspired him, music which is all about living an individualistic, heroic and quintessentially American life, so he has to go out and live that life.
Scorsese and Dylan are clearly aware of the hypocracy of their mission. They are here to carefully document the past, when so much of Dylan's ethos in his early years was a rejection of this kind of note-taking and analysis. In various inteviews with the press (particularly with the strange, desperate-for-intimacy and frequently baffled European press), Dylan pointedly refuses to look introspectively into his songs for "meaning." Usually, when someone wants some insight into his music or his personality, he turns their questions around on them.
"Do you think of yourself as a protest singer," a man will ask?
"Do you think of me that way?" Dylan parries.
And yet now, here we are, 40 years later, scanning this archival footage looking for...what? Meaning? But wasn't the whole point that the music was the meaning? That the songs were what mattered, and anything else Dylan had to say would pale in comparison?
That's how I used to feel. Joan Baez during the film says something that rings very true for me...Some people hear Dylan and dismiss him. "Oh, yeah, that rootsy twangy jingle-jang stuff...Whatever..." But the people who hear Dylan and do, for whatever reason, appreciate him are genuinely moved by him. He's not a musicial with a lot of casual fans.
So my perspective was always that Bob Dylan just wanted to write songs and make music, and all the press and fandom and attention and rock critic think pieces about him were just distractions. So he goofed around and made himself an obscure enigmatic mystery, the wandering, surreal, half-mad troubadour whose behavior is beyond understanding.
But after seeing No Direction Home and reading Dylan's memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, I'm not so sure. He's more contradictory than that. He's a man who genuinely wanted fame, who pursued it selfishly at times. Joan Baez, though very gracious in the film, clearly still carries around the disappointment of being left behind by Dylan as he pursued greater and greater fame as a rock star. (An incident where he did not invite her on stage with him in Britain is clearly a sore spot).
As well, for someone who shies away from the spotlight so much, he's not exactly a humble man. Bob speaks frequently, as do those around him, about how his music will be played and discussed for decades to come. Now, it seems eerily prophetic to hear the session musicians for "Highway 61 Revisited" say that they knew it would be a classic album, but to know it for certain at the time takes a certain amount of arrogance.
Many, many more contradictions abound. That's really what the guy is all about, when you get right down to it. A moody eccentric genius who's also funny and incredibly charismatic. A writer of some of the most brilliant political songs ever written who denies caring at all about politics. Perhaps the most influential entertainer of his generation, yet he claims to feel like an outsider. A man who, at the peak of his fame and popularity in the mid-60's, was going on stage every night to thunderous cat calls and boos.
Scorsese spends a lot of time on the fan reaction to Dylan's famed switch from acoustic to electric guitar, and addition of a blues band to his live show. He interlaces footage of Dylan's infamous Albert Hall performance, where his set with the musicians who would become the legendary The Band was greeted with shocking negativity, throughout the entire film. Perhaps he sees this as Dylan's defining moment...his utter refusal to bow to the pressures of his fan community, his willingness to turn his back on his strongest supports in order to fulfill his own artistic goals.
Some of the footage in this movie is truly unbelievable. First, that there is material of such sound quality and clarity around of these historic concerts, and second, that these crowds are loudly booing during these amazing songs. I mean, if I could go back in time to 1966 and see Bob Dylan and The Band play "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Maggie's Farm," I'd be pretty excited. I certainly wouldn't think to boo and hiss and call him a traitor.
So No Direction Home provides some perspective. We see Pete Seeger, kind of the grandfather of the folk music movement at the time, discussing his disappointment with Dylan. It's less that Bob started recording rock songs, as it was that Seeger and the rest of the folk community discovered that he had never really been the patron saint they had thought. His songs were so brilliant, everyone just assumed that the man who created them was some kind of prophet sent to Earth to lead them.
When they discovered he was just a remarkably talented musician who had written these songs in an effort to sound like his musical heroes, and who was willing to leave folk music aside and go off in some other direction when the mood suited him, they were a bit crest-fallen.
And so they took it out on Dylan, buying tickets to his shows so they could sit there and howl at the stage. It's very powerful stuff. It makes you realize how closely people can come to identify with the musicians they listen to every day. These men become more than entertainers, but figureheads for an entire way of life. Even Dylan admits to feeling this way about his musical idols, like Woody Guthrie.
"You could listen to these songs," Dylan says, "and learn about a way to live your life."
But when fans tried to do that with Bob Dylan songs, he recoiled in horror and shuttled off in a different direction. Whether that's heroic or cowardly is left to everyone to decide for themselves. What isn't in doubt is that the music he wrote in his folk phase and the music he continued to write (and continues to write to this day) is of an amazingly high quality, and actively demands attention.
And all of that is only one facet of this wholly remarkable film. Scorsese also tackles Dylan's sidelong involvement in the civil rights struggle, his often contentious relationships with other artists of his time, like Allen Ginsberg (who discusses his long-standing friendship with Dylan at length in an old interview), the Beatles, Johnny Cash and Andy Warhol, and even some of his odd personal ticks. When it's all over, you hardly have a complete picture of Bob Dylan, but you're probably about as close as anyone's going to get any time soon.
Considering that the also-phenomenal doco Overnight was a 2004 film, No Direction Home is clearly the best documentary I've seen thus far in 2005.
He got the "jail pale."
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