Scorsese does Dylan. That’s all the pitch that No Direction Home: Bob Dylan needs. Arguably the greatest US-American filmmaker profiling, for more than three hours, arguably the greatest US-American musician. The film’s arguments about the mixed blessings of fame and fortune, coming of age in public and balancing artistic production with living life are timeless. Yet, No Direction Home has a very specific sense of time and place, namely early ‘60s New York, that lends it urgency as it unspools its fable about the artist and what he has to sacrifice.
As the film portrays it, Dylan’s emergence as a songwriting, harmonica-buzzing dynamo in 1963 was like the appearance of an uncharted comet: out of the familiar night sky a sudden brilliant flashing light that will forever after be known and tracked. In 1962, he was just one of scores of ambitious, half-starving beatniks strumming a guitar in random Greenwich shops and pubs. By 1965, he had four massively popular albums. More improbably though, the songs Dylan wrote on those four albums captured the zeitgeist and channeled the feelings of an entire generation; they are masterworks of English wordsmithing that later helped him win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was, in 1965, 24 years old, a boy genius.
That is how Scorsese frames him, anyhow. There is certainly some mythologizing going on, but it is never excessive. Dylan was, as he describes in arguably his most iconic lyrics, a complete unknown, just like a rolling stone. A wandering kid with few thoughts and even fewer plans, escaping the barren landscape of Minnesota’s Iron Range to hitchhike to New York and visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital. A few months later, he was recording “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
No Direction Home focuses on Dylan’s early career to portray what it means to be a comet, a wunderkind putting into lyrics the collective angst of everyone his own age. Dylan was formed in the countercultural cauldron of the New York folk scene, making friends with Pete Seeger, Liam Clancy and Guthrie, among others. He got romantically (and artistically) involved with Joan Baez. Seeger was a card-carrying Communist, Guthrie scribbled “This Machine Kills Fascists” on every guitar he owned and Baez has always been a building-occupying rabble-rouser. Dylan, then, was shaped on a pottery wheel of radical politics. His early songs, such as “Masters of War,” reflect this formation. Yet, as the film demonstrates, Dylan saw “topical” songs and protest music as a straitjacket to be escaped. He did not want to be pinned down or defined. One does not, after all, contain a comet; one watches in wonder as it burns while hurtling past.
Dylan the iconic protest musician was discarded by Dylan himself, but not by his adoring public. This is the price of fame: the famous surrender their self-determinative capacity. They become their fan’s perception of their work. Dylan hated it. It is no wonder that someone as accomplished as Scorsese, whose “fans” voice their unrest when he releases a film that does not result in a climactic bloodletting shootout, would approach Bob Dylan in this way. Barely more than a child, Dylan lashed out petulantly, with public stunts on stage and in press conferences. But he also continued to write and write, cranking out in the next 30 months another three albums chock full of some of the most celebrated songs of the past 60 years: “Chimes of Freedom,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Like a Rolling Stone” among them. By 1965, Dylan had also, according to both his fans and critics—often the two categories are indistinguishable, as his early fans became critical of his “selling out”—abandoned the pure, politico-artistic genre of folk music and taken up the adulterated mantle of the commercially lucrative rock music emerging in that moment. When he played the Newport Folk Festival with electric instruments in 1964, the pandemonium and rage was so hyperbolic that the great Seeger himself went looking for a hatchet to cut the band’s cables to get the cacophony to stop.
This is where Scorsese’s filmmaking prowess adds to the fable of the wandering troubadour who became an icon. Intercut throughout the entire runtime of No Direction Home are scenes from Dylan’s 1965 tour through Britain, where fans relentlessly booed him on stage and loudly voiced their disappointment in his becoming the frontman of a bad “pop group” when they had bought tickets to see a folk singer-songwriter. No one liked the electric guitars and drums that accompanied him from town to town. But Dylan did. Or, at least, as Scorsese has it, he liked pushing back against the way others defined him. He rejected the way fame and fortune wanted to contain him. He was his own person and he could take his music whatever direction he chose. Dylan predicted, correctly, that the public would come to him.
No Direction Home is about how celebrity transforms the chosen one into the prodigal son, the boy genius who is the toast of the town into a rebellious young man reacting against the wishes of the throbbing masses. It must be on the shortlist of best music documentaries ever composed.
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