No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

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.

Having been a casual listener of Bob Dylan, I found this documentary rather insightful and well-made. Narrated by Dylan, director Martin Scorsese basically interviews friends, colleagues and family of Dylan (as well as Dylan himself) and gets to the roots of his inspiration and upbringing.

As I said above, I'm not a huge fan of Dylan insofar that I'd be able to tell you all of his songs, albums, etc. Some of my personal favorites are "Like a Rolling Stone," "The Man in Me" and of course "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." The film's soundtrack uses Dylan songs which is a nice addition as well. It's four hours long and when screened on TV comes in two parts, so you may have to see it in two viewings. But I found out a lot about Dylan that I didn't know before and I think that's the point.

Well-made, well-documented.

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.

Fascinating, but when the film was over I didn't really understand Dylan's genius to any greater degree than I had before. How did he go from being just another musician on the folk revival scene (as Paul Wilson observes, "(Dylan) wasn't the best, he wasn't the worst", and he had the same basic repertoire as his contemporaries) to writing songs like 'Masters of War', 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and 'Like a Rolling Stone'? And how did it happen so quickly? Probably this is as much of a mystery to Bob Dylan as it is to everyone else. Documenting honest-to-God inspiration of the type that Dylan received in those years--and understanding why he, rather than Joan Baez or Phil Ochs or Tom Paxton, received it--might well be impossible. But "No Direction Home" is utterly engrossing anyhow. Martin Scorsese does a fantastic job of documenting Dylan's emergence from the cold, dreary Midwest, the time he spent honing his craft in the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, and his rise to superstardom. (Yes, the audience at the Newport Folk Festival really *did* boo Dylan when he played a brief electric set there in 1965!) Of particular interest are the interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Dave Van Ronk, both of whom departed this life well before the completion of Scorsese's film. Obviously this is a must-see if you're a Dylan fan, but "No Direction Home" should--despite its length--hold the interest of more casual viewers, too.

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