Bob Dylan. Martin Scorsese. What more do you need to know?

It’s on right now on PBS: No Direction Home

I’ll add my reactions after the movie.

The standard by which Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” will be judged is D.A. Pennebaker’s landmark Don’t Look Back.

Yet the two films are entirely different animals. Pennebaker described his film as less a documentary than a piece of cinéma vérité.

It appears that Dylan has decided recently that he wants to educate people about himself — at some expense to his legacy.

Scorsese’s film is a straightforward documentary, taking us through Dylan’s life and times in chronological order. And while it is a documentary about Bob Dylan’s growth as an artist and as a man, it views him through the lens of his influences, describing the social and musical scenes through which he moved.

Early in the documentary, Dylan talks about changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. “I forgot about the iron range where I grew up — I forgot about it all,” he says. This act of erasure was formative: like another great, self-made American, discarding his past afforded him space to create an identity from scratch.

Dylan’s sound, derived from a host of disparate influences and filtered through his own genius, was nevertheless his own. Dylan describes Joan Baez as “staggering — she kind of hit my world from a different angle.”

As Frank points out in the comments to this post, the moment in the film when Allen Ginsberg chokes up as he remembers hearing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” for the first time is only one example of Dylan’s own ability to hit listeners from unexpected angles.

Watching this documentary put me in mind of how much things have changed since giants roamed the streets of Greenwich Village. One sees, in Scorsese’s film, a time whose bohemian latitude seems distant and impossible from the vantage point of today’s social puritanism.

On the other hand, even back then, uptight listeners complained about Dylan’s “wretched harmonica,” and rumors of someone bringing a shotgun to a show led Dylan to quip, “I don’t mind being shot, but I don’t think being told about it is good.”

Part 2 airs tomorrow night. Miss it at your peril.

But if you don’t get a chance to see it, you can purchase it here.

Here is another take on the film that argues against an easy acceptance of Scorsese’s nostalgia, which I seemed to swallow without too much of a problem (perhaps I was lulled by the great music).

Incidentally, I’ve checked out a few other reviews of the film through a google blog search, and have read others complaining about the fact that the documentary featured too much music from others, and not enough from Dylan himself.

In that sense, Scorsese seems to subscribe to the notion that an artist is the amalgam of his influences. I have reservations about that line of thinking (in extreme versions, it can lead to a critical evaluation that erases the artist’s will), but in Dylan’s case, it seems like a corrective to the myth of the artist as sui generis genius.

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