The two-part film includes never-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives intertwined with Dylan’s during that time. For the first time on camera, Dylan talks openly and extensively about this critical period in his career.It’s virtually impossible to approach No Direction Home without a cluster of fixed ideas. Who doesn’t have their own private Dylan? The true excellence of Martin Scorsese’s achievement lies in how his documentary shakes us free of our comfortable assumptions. In the process, it plays out on several levels at once, each taking shape as an unfailingly fascinating narrative. There is, of course, the central story of an individual genius staking out his artistic identity. But along with this Bildungsroman come other threads and contexts: most notably, the role of popular culture in postwar America, art’s self-reliance versus its social responsibilities, and fans’ complicity with the publicity machine in sustaining myths. All of these threads reinforce each other, together weaving the film’s intricate texture.
Scorsese’s 200-plus-minute focus on Dylan’s earliest years allows for a portrayal of unprecedented depth, with multiple angles: a rich composite photo is the result. The main narrative has an epic quality: it moves from Dylan growing up in cold-war Minnesota through Greenwich Village coffeehouses and the Newport Folk Festival, climaxing in the controversial 1966 U.K. tour that crowned a period of unbridled and explosive creativity. In his transition from Robert Allen Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, we observe him concocting his impossible-to-describe, unique combination of the topical with the archaic, like an ancient oracle. Scorsese was able to access previously unseen footage from the Dylan archives, including performances, press conferences, and recording sessions. He also uses interviews with Dylan’s friends, ex-friends, and fellow artists, and, intriguingly, with the notoriously reclusive Dylan himself (who looks back to provide glosses on the early years), fusing what could have turned into a tiresome series of digressions and tangents into a powerful whole as enlightening, eccentric, contradictory, and ultimately irreducible as its subject.
Some of the deeply personal bits remain unrevealed, but Dylan’s preternatural self-assurance acquires a slightly self-deprecating, even comic edge via some of his reflective comments. Alongside the arrogance, we see touching moments of the young artist’s reverence for Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash. Joan Baez, in a poignant confessional mood, comes off well, and the late Allen Ginsberg is so seraphically charming he almost steals the show a few times. A crucial throughline is Dylan’s hunger for recognition and ability to shape perceptions so that would be singled out as not just another dime-a-dozen folk singer. It’s illuminating–particularly for those familiar with the artist’s latter-day aloofness on stage–to see his reactions to audience booing in the wake of his “betrayal” in this fuller context. No Direction Home also makes clear–in a way that wasn’t possible in D.A. Pennebaker’s iconic Don’t Look Back–how Dylan’s ability to manipulate his persona always, at its core, protects the urge for expression: Dylan’s ultimate mandate, as an artist, is never to be pinned down. As Scorsese masterfully shows, the myth around Dylan only grows bigger the more we discover about him. –Thomas May
DVD features: This two-disc set of Scorsese’s full two-part documentary includes treats such as Dylan working on a song at his hotel during the UK tour as well as performing several songs as in concert or on TV.
More for the Dylanologist
 No Direction Home: The Soundtrack |
 Chronicles: Volume One (paperback edition) |
 Bob Dylan Scrapbook |
 Don’t Look Back |
 The Bob Dylan Bootleg Series |
 The Last Waltz |
Buy “Bob Dylan – No Direction Home” For Only $8.40
March 5, 2010
#1
Bob Dylan thinks putting out of movie of him talking is supposed to be cool? Granted there are some performances but its all in black and white!!! And sometimes there’s no band, just him and his boring guitar and harmonica. He doesn’t even try to solo. I’ve seen much better rock performances by the likes of Dokken, Ratt, or Poison (take your pick). At least these newer bands look like they’re trying to have fun. Bob Dylan just mopes and poses but never rocks out. Funny thing is people just seem to gobble this suff up. Sometimes there’s no accounting for taste
March 5, 2010
#2
I can’t believe this is only offered in fullscreen and not a widescreen version. I realize they aired this on television, but there must be a fullscreen version coming out. I’m waiting until there is. I have a large screen tv and I want to take full advantage of it. Plus, fullscreen sucks, you lose so much of the picture.
March 5, 2010
#3
I was so disappointed with this documentary. Why does it only go through the late 60s? Dylan has THIRTY more years of his career, which is ENTIRELY ignored in the film. Martin Scorsese made this? What? Oh how the mighty have fallen. To me, the most interesting part of Dylan’s career was when he turned his back on all the folk music/hippy nonsense and got real, real weird – but you won’t see any of this in this clunker. Avoid.
March 5, 2010
#4
If only the folks who made A Mighty Wind had been able to watch this self aggrandizing train-wreck for inspiration. It is much stranger and even sometimes slightly funnier (especially when Joan Baez immitates Dylan and some guy dressed like Crocodile Dundee pontificates about his genius), but in the end it is little more than mire for wallowing in or fodder for satire. The folkies come off as naive and self-centered, the rockers come off as sophemoric and insulated.
On the plus side, it was kind of fun (for an old fan) to see Dylan as a young man playing his electric guitar and braying into a microphone in front of a top notch combo of pop musicians, but after a while all the syrupy interviews and congratulatory tales of his genius and all the glances at his face peering out of the darkness pontificating about what amounts to marginalia at best, just get too tedious.
Shorten this movie to 87 minutes (most of it concert footage)and it might have been something special, as it is… well, it beats A Mighty Wind (by about 2 1/2 hours).
If anyone needed further proof that Dylan was just a pop-star and Martin Scorcese was an over-rated one-note film maker, this is it.
March 5, 2010
#5
It’s hard to tell which is more confusing – this terribly unfocused rambling documentary or its insufferable subject. Bob Dylan has always struck me as nothing more than a very coy businessman. With a few exceptions (Tangled up in Blue, Shelter from the Storm), his music is quite feeble in terms of melodic composition, lyrics and actual performance. This documentary, like many of Dylan’s sheep fans, confuses pretentiousness with profundity. I gave it two stars for the backround scenery in the old film footage.