No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

NO DIRECTION HOME is, without a doubt, the very best music-themed Documentary I have ever seen in my life!

Before diving in...Let us FOCUS on the Title´s Content & Context:

For any person who considers themselves someone with a special interest in pop culture, music, sociology or even contemporary history, this mesmerizing Martin Scorsese documentary not only is a "MUST SEE", but I would say a "Must have"! (As in "your collection"!)

Here we gain the most fascinating insight into many aspects of Dylan's early career, his creative process, his relationships with other artists and music industry insiders, (particularly with one time love interest, Joan Baez) and the general interaction of Bob Dylan, his music, his growing popularity and the overall effect of these on our culture in the 1960's!

Some of what is covered, I think I was previously aware of, some of it, I wasn't, and quite a bit of it had simply been forgotten, owing to the half a century that has passed!

What surprised me most in DIRECTION HOME? Well, Joan Baez is interviewed extensively and has perhaps the most on-screen time other than Bob Dylan himself. In the 60's and 70's, I always admired Baez as a very talented, outspoken and highly principed young woman ...But, quite honestly, never considered her as being very attractive. She has to be, what?... Like mid-70's when she was interviewed for this documentary. To see her now, so mature, articulate, radiant, overflowing with self-confidence... Well, let's just say that all of this made it EXTREMELY HARD for me to overlook her onscreen appearance!

Well, I hope this review did not contain too much imformation!

ENJOY! / DISFRUTELA!

Any comments. Questions or observations.... in ENGLISH o en ESPAÑOL... are most Welcome!

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

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.

I really don't know what to say after viewing Martin Scorsese's mesmerizing three-hour+ made for PBS film except that I am truly impressed. And although it is more of a chronicle of an era (the early 1960's and what lead to Dylan's fame) then a biography of Bob Dylan I was surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did. At first I was skeptical, I thought it had pretensions of grandeur: Dylan/and Scorsese? I mean come on guys!? But the piece delivered. It was cut in such a way that seemed to create drama out of raw material. Although ponderous at times the film not only held my interest but made me want to find out more about Bob Dylan, the NYC folk scene, Pete, Seger, Woody Guthrie, Allen Ginsberg, Liam Clancy, Joan Baez and many others. The interviews were fascinating, humorous and sometimes truly educational. There is a purpose and a true sense of that time to the film that is unlike most other "rock" documentaries. In one of my favorite interviews in the film Bob Neuwirth explains how in the early 60's money (financial success) was not an issue when it came to the arts. Back then it was about if an artist had something to say. Weather it was Bob Dylan or Ornette Coleman what people would ask was "does he (the artist) have something to say." Money and the "bottom line" didn't enter into the equation. It was a whole different world back then. Neuwirth states this so glibly that you'll wish you had a time-machine to go back and check it out for yourself. I have at least one friend who was disappointed in the film. He felt that it didn't illuminate the life of Dylan enough in that it ends in 1966 with him being "booed" offstage for "going electric." But apparently this is all Dylan wanted to reveal for this film. He (and his people) gave Martin Scorsese specific instructions to only chronicle this period. Scorsese was asked to sort through hours of material (including 10-hours of recent Dylan interviews). The result is amazing considering these limitations. Instead of illuminating the Dylan myth the film uses "myth" to stir a powerful narrative, one that rivals many of Scosese's latest cinematic endeavors. Perhaps another director would have tried to create something more definitive regarding the details of Dylans life and songwriting process but Scorsese has always favored myth over reality in him films. And in the case of No Direction Home I believe he mixes together the perfect combination of myth, mystery and reality. Sure there are great Dylan performances throughout the feature but they are tied together by a larger narrative which is the journey of an artist (at a particular stage in his life). Some of the highlights for me musically and otherwise were Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival where he has trouble tuning his guitar but still comes off as some sort of "folk messiah" to the folkies present ( was that scene even real?! ), Al Kooper talking about how he came up for the organ part for Like a Rolling Stone (hilarious). Dylan performing (if only snippets of, sigh…) "Masters of War," and his "Hard Rain" and the final performance of the film (Like a Rolling Stone) when Dylan summons his band (the Band) to "play it f*ck#ng loud!" in order offset the hecklers booing his electric set in England in 1966. Ironically I recently read a quote from Jim Jarmusch talking about NYC in the late 1970's, he said, "I feel so lucky. During the late 70's in New York, anything seemed possible. You could make a movie or a record and work part time, and you could find an apartment for 160 bucks a month. And the conversations were about ideas. No one was talking about money. It was pretty amazing. But looking back is dangerous. I don't like nostalgia. But, still, damn, it was fun. I'm glad I was there." Be it the early 1960's or the late 1970's perhaps the charm and "myth" of such an era inspired Dylan and company to chronicle only his "golden era" as opposed to trying to trace his entire career ( which could have proved to be less then fruitful ). Instead we get a wonderful slice of life about a great time in American History, about a great artist and put together on film by a great filmmaker. I'm not going to complain.