The reviews are coming in for Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, and it’s sounding more and more like Marty hit the mark and made something for the ages. RWB certainly hopes so. I’ve expressed reservations about it in the past, regarding both its potential for distortion with regard to the politics of Dylan’s work, and the fact that it was focusing only on the period up till 1966 – a period which after all has been widely covered and written about already, many times over. Reading the advance reviews, however, I think this film will be a success if it succeeds in telling that story better than it has ever been told in one place. Ultimately, the best telling of the story of Dylan’s artistic development will remain the records he made. Sit down and listen to his first 7 albums – from 1962’s Bob Dylan to 1966’s Blonde On Blonde, and you will have been carried on a musical and poetic odyssey unlike any other.

The film’s visuals and juxtaposition of the developing Dylan with the fully metamorphosed 1966 version will likely wield their power through the device of compression. It’s one thing to know that the 21 year old kid who recorded House of the Risin’ Sun in 1962 is the same person as the 25 year old who sang Visions of Johanna in 1966. It’s another to see this transformation happening in the space of a couple of hours on a screen.

Today in the New York Sun, there is a very positive review of the film, and this passage caught my eye:

There’s a wonderful scene in which Mr. Dylan performs at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival’s Topical Song Workshop, the very heart of the protest song culture. But instead of singing something topical, he brashly belts out the kaleidoscopically opaque “Mr. Tambourine Man” while Mr. Seeger – the man responsible for the maxim “it’s how much good a song does, not how good it is, that matters” – looks on, nervously tapping his foot and holding his mouth in his hands. If he’d let it go, his jaw would have dropped.

“It’s how much good a song does, not how good it is, that matters,” according to Pete Seeger. Methinks Josef Stalin could hardly have said it better. Think about that “topical song workshop” as a farm, of sorts, and you can see right away who “Maggie” is.

So, plenty to look forward to there, on many levels. I’ll be seeing it on DVD before it airs on PBS and putting my broader reaction up here, I expect. And if you order it from the link below, you’ll be doing RWB a favor.

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• On the fiftieth birthday of the Newport Folk Festival
• Odds and Ends
• “Factory Girl” cont’d