If it’s revelations about Bob Dylan’s parents, children or lovers you seek, leave at your own chosen speed.
PBS’s “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home” is the anti-biography.
The mercurial singer-songwriter born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, Dylan is now and forever a mystery man. He worked hard to become inscrutable, and he is not about to be pinned down in what is essentially an authorized biography.
Still, it remains an irresistible ride. Martin Scorsese’s film encompasses just five years in the life of the musical-cultural icon, sketching his boyhood in Hibbing, Minn., the waif’s arrival in New York City in 1961, extending to his (first) creative peak and through the motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, N.Y., and his 1966 retirement from the spotlight.
The constant refrain is Dylan’s struggle with celebrity, alternately craving and hating the exposure, and his unwillingness to meet public or press expectations.
“I was a musical expeditionary,” he says. “I had no past.” By discounting his roots he is free to create himself, with help from Kerouac and a range of musical antecedents.
This lack of introspection can be infuriating. The name change didn’t happen in any of the ways he’s read about, he says. It was intended neither to dodge anti-Semitism, nor to honor Dylan Thomas. To hear him tell it, “Dylan” just popped into his head. He repeats that level of noncritical thinking with regard to his lyrics too. Clearly, the poet will leave analysis to others, letting his words’ multiple meanings stand for themselves.
Through the riveting look back, Joan Baez comes across as the most evolved participant of the times. The entertainment press corps comes out the worst.
Baez, Dylan’s “special friend,” was already an established protest singer when she took him by the hand and introduced him at the Newport Jazz Festival. She is gracious as she recalls how difficult it was to work with him and how he never repaid the favor once he achieved stardom. She lights up the screen, talking animatedly from her brightly colored kitchen. By contrast, he is pictured only in tight closeup, black leather jacket over black T-shirt, in a study.
In archival footage, reporters at a press conference attempt to probe Dylan’s motivations, inspirations and affiliations. They look ridiculous as he makes fun of them with non-answers. A smile flickers faintly, and Dylan’s amusement at, and disgust with, the process is evident. In contemporary footage from the interview, when he allows a smile to play across his wrinkles, the world seems to relax.
Culled from 10 hours of interviews with Dylan conducted last year by his manager, Jeff Rosen, the film contains hours of previously unreleased film footage from concerts, home movies, British TV broadcasts and outtakes from “Don’t Look Back,” D.A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking documentary.
The resulting Scorsese film is just like its subject: often frustrating but always compelling.
Dylan’s creative flowering in Greenwich Village and his self-invention in the mode of Woody Guthrie are recounted with insights from close onlookers including photographer John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Langhorne, girlfriend Suze Rotolo, Pete Seeger and the late Dave Van Ronk.
As ever, Dylan is either a prophet, channeling the collective unconscious in lasting poetry, or he’s a seriously weird guy who’s grown to believe his own acting persona. This film won’t settle the argument. In fact, it makes a case in both directions over the two nights. Gifted iconoclast, unwitting voice of a generation, the harmonica playing folk-rocker whose lyrics are studied in literature classes, Dylan is as maddening as he is musically important.
“American Masters” had lobbied Dylan to agree to a profile for 10 years. The fact that he gave in now, coincidental with the publication of his book, “Chronicles Vol. 1,” may strike some as a suspiciously savvy marketing move. We’ll take it. The DVD offers extras the book can’t, namely performances of “Blowin’ in the Wind” from a 1963 live TV appearance, “Girl From the North Country,” from an unaired 1964 Canadian TV special, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “One Too Many Mornings.”
Scorsese reconstructs the musical influences young Dylan heard from faraway radio stations, intercutting shots of 1950s Hibbing with the story of his principal pulling the curtain on Bobby Zimmerman’s first school performance.
Dylan’s memory of the “duck and cover” drills of the paranoid Cold War years and his introduction to the work of James Dean and Marlon Brando make him sound like a normal, alienated American teen. Dylan recounts his early intention to attend West Point. Cut to the skinny kid playing “Like A Rolling Stone,” his first major hit, and the booing of traditional folk fans.
“He’s changed altogether,” a British fan gripes in 1966.
That was always the plan.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
