Do Look Back
No Direction HomeParamount Home Entertainment
Shaman. Protest singer. Traitor. Crap. Bob Dylan has been called many things, but few have ever called him genial or forthcoming. Blame it on age or on his 1997 near-fatal heart infection, but rock’s most picked-over enigma is slowly opening up to define his legend on his own terms. If Dylan threw a flicker of illumination onto his formative years with last year’s Chronicles memoir, this three-and-a-half-hour documentary, directed by Martin Scorsese and narrated largely by Dylan himself, is a klieg light.
Considering the archival footage that shows the subject in his prickly prime, No Direction Home’s candid new interview material, in which Dylan is not just un-gnomic but warm and funny, seems all the more startling. At one point, remembering his first girlfriends, he looks directly at the camera and says they “brought out the poet” in him, with a wolfishness that even Jack Nicholson might consider a bit much. Later, recalling his encounter with spiritual mentor Woody Guthrie at the mental institution where the latter ended up, Dylan’s heartbreak, almost half a century on, is evident.
Less evident is the mark of Scorsese himself, who never spoke to Dylan during filming (interviews were conducted by Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen); anyone expecting his usual flashy style should brace for a conventional, deliberately paced treatment. The combination of contemporary interviews and vintage film—including D.A. Pennebaker’s electric-in-every-sense footage from the controversial 1966 British tour and the never-beforeseen “Judas!” heckle—is so compelling, it’s easy to overlook the ground not covered: Apart from one peer’s comment that “Everybody wanted to get high with Bobby,” no mention is made, for instance, of his drug use.
Moreover, the film ends with the terse proclamation that, after the ’66 tour, Dylan retired from playing live for eight years in the wake of a motorcycle accident, even though some Bob-o-philes contest that said mishap was serious, or even that it occurred at all. Perhaps such issues will be covered in a sequel and, despite this film’s butt-numbing length, here’s hoping there is one.
