Bob Dylan: No Direction Home

When Bob Dylan hit the snowy streets of New York in the winter of 1961, it seemed cameras were waiting for him, as if there’d been news of his coming. In No Direction Home, director Martin Scorsese digs up early home-movie footage of Dylan clowning like Chaplin. The fresh-faced 20-year-old looks incredibly innocent; there’s no indication that within a year he’ll reinvent the Greenwich Village folk scene, or go on to blur forever the line between poetry and songwriting.

Scorsese is confident and unobtrusive. He paints Dylan as a streetwise waif who could’ve been a character in one of his own songs: the Jack of Hearts, maybe, or Renaldo in his film Renaldo and Clara. Even this early, his past was already fading and a more fitting one was being invented—Dylan the hard traveler who’d worked carnivals, hoboed freight trains and jammed with bluesmen like Manse Lipscomb. In no time, he knew Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and was sleeping on Dave Van Ronk’s couch.

For his film, Scorsese had endless footage to choose from, including archival reels from the Newport Folk Festivals and D.A. Pennebaker’s tour documentaries Don’t Look Back and the unreleased Eat The Document. Outtakes were also juxtaposed with recent interviews by Dylan manager Jeff Rosen with Village stalwarts who had a ground’s-eye view of the Dylan phenomenon. After 40 years, emotions still run high—mostly awe, as if these aging folkies were groping for words to describe the coming of a prophet. “He was Charlie Chaplin and Dylan Thomas and he talked like Woody Guthrie,” Liam Clancy says. Most touching is Allen Ginsberg’s account of first hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and realizing Dylan was heir apparent to the entire Beat Generation. “It was clear the torch had been passed,” says an emotional Ginsberg.

But No Direction Home makes clear that Dylan was uncomfortable with torches of any persuasion, and a little disquieted by how many folks were following him. He never wanted to be the leader of anything, he says; he just wanted to sing certain songs that didn’t exist and in order for them to exist he had to write them.

“Bobby wasn’t political,” Van Ronk says. “We used to kid him about being politically naive. Now in retrospect he looks smarter than we were.” A young Dylan tells a clueless reporter, “I always think of myself as just a song and dance man.” “How many folksingers are there writing protest songs about the war in Vietnam and social causes,” a scribe who looks like the inspiration for “Ballad of a Thin Man” asks him, and Scorsese flashes Dylan’s mercurial facial expressions—perplexity, irritation, amusement. “How many? About 136.” The reporter, pencil ready, asks, “Is that about 136 or exactly 136?” “Either 136 or 142,” Dylan says, the ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

Scorsese’s main concern is the music. He uses snippets of the acoustic “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” from Dylan’s first album layered with excerpts from the barnstorming electric version he performed with The Band to show Dylan morphing from chambray-clad proletariat to Carnaby Street rocker. And with a 1964 performance of “Chimes of Freedom” we see the lyrics changing, too, more concerned with Dylan’s interior landscape than social upheaval.

When Dylan plugged in with the Butterfield Blues Band at Newport 1965 and kicked into a raucous “Maggie’s Farm,” the director provides a Rashoman take on Dylan’s perceived betrayal. Everybody’s got their story and they’re sticking to it: Mike Bloomfield contrasted with Peter Yarrow; Seeger downplaying his purported search for an axe to chop through the stage’s power supply.

Most of the electric footage is from Pennebaker’s 1966 work, and it’s a revelation. Dylan and the Band are playing take-no-prisoners rock in the face of hostile guerilla skirmishes threatening to erupt into full-scale warfare. By the end of the ’66 tour (and Scorsese’s movie), Dylan looks frail, wasted and weary. In four years he’s started the folk revival, killed it, inherited the mantle of the Beat Generation and reinvented rock ’n’ roll, and he looks like the culture-imposed burden is about to crack his spine.

“How many walked out?” he asks Robbie Robertson, then smiles and shakes his head. “I may walk out myself tonight.” Then, later: “I think I’ll get me another Bob Dylan and put him out on the road. See how long he lasts.”

But onstage he’s transcendent, as if the electricity is coursing through his body. “Judas!” a heckler yells. “I don’t believe you,” Dylan says. “You’re a liar.” He turns to guitarist Robertson. “Play f—ing loud.” The snare drum kickstarts “Like A Rolling Stone” and a wall of sound blasts from the speakers. Dylan’s face goes from defiance to triumph. How does it feel? From Dylan’s expression, just fine.