Scorsese documents Dylan on No Direction Home

David Knowles Public Relations Manager

American popular culture operates within the premises of a tragic contradiction. As a consuming public we demand that our cultural figures embody our feelings, our hopes, our fears, our desires, while at the same time living as their own unique creative voice. No figure in the pantheon of American music represents this contradiction more than Bob Dylan and it is this contradiction that forms the overarching theme of No Direction Home, the new film by Martin Scorsese about one of America’s most famous voices.

The film opens with one of the most complete portraits of Dylan’s childhood ever constructed. “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be so I’m on my way home,” he says. Dylan finds a guitar in his father’s house and begins imitating the sounds and styles of folk and blues heroes of the day—Muddy Waters, Johnnie Ray, and his personal hero, Woody Guthrie. Rare audio recordings made during Dylan’s high school years are presented along with interviews with childhood friends and one of the most in-depth interviews ever conducted with Dylan himself.

Scorsese tracks Dylan to Greenwich Village in the 1960’s where his career truly began and includes snippets of archived interviews with bohemian heroes of the day including Allen Ginsberg, Maria Maulder and James Baldwin. As Scorsese tracks Dylan’s rise as a folk superstar he provides subtle and elegant foreshadowing of Dylan’s future. When asked about why he left Hibbing, Minnesota, where he was born, Dylan replies “I could envision myself dying in some heroic battle somewhere.” This early documentation is laced with footage of Dylan’s performances in 1966 on his first electric tour where his new raucous stylings are met with boos from formerly adoring fans. By that time, it seems, he has ceased to embody the feelings of his audiences.

The picture that Scorsese paints of Dylan is softer than the one constructed by D.A. Pennebaker in his film Don’t Look Back, which documents Dylan’s 1965 acoustic tour of England. In that film Dylan is portrayed as arrogant, selfish and immature. The Dylan presented in No Direction Home provokes empathy in the viewer. This undoubtedly has a lot to do with the scope of the film. The audience experiences Dylan’s youthful innocence and his jaded alienation. He is portrayed as radical and creative but above all as an American, embodying our greatest triumphs and our deepest flaws.