No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

Directed By: Martin Scorsese

This is fitting tribute by one of the greatest filmmakers to one the greatest musicians. In its two parts we are taken from Dylan’s Humble beginnings in Hibbing, Minnesota to his tours in Europe. To someone who has heard of Dylan and only vaguely has heard his music or discounted him because he doesn’t carry a tune as well as most other singers I would say take a look at this documentary and you will gain a whole new understanding on the life and times of this artist. To those who have heard and enjoy his music, such as myself, this film only gave me new understanding of Dylan and a deeper appreciation of his talent.
What is used to tell the story of Bob Dylan is not only Dylan’s own accounts and thoughts but also archival footage as well as the people he sang with or worked with. We learn he (his real name was Robert Zimmerman) had a knack for music from an early age and was most influenced by topical singers like Woody Guthre. Though many people say he was a topical singer Dylan himself opposes that label.
His town of Hibbing in Minnesota was a Mining town and it really isn’t any place to be for a young man interested in pursuing a career in music. For a while he thought about going into Military School but eventually decided to go to New York City which at that time was the center of everything both new and old in America. He plays at bars in Greenwich Village and eventually rises in popularity. It is certainly not his voice that has started making him sell records like practically every singer of that time. Rather it is what he had to say. What he writes seems to resonate with America’s youth and culture even though he claims he didn’t know why he wrote what he did or even what the inspiration for it was. The “biography” continues to go on about Dylan and how as his fame grew he resisted the attempt made on him by others to conform him to a particular cause or movement. It has been said that this ability for Dylan to be his own person was the reason why people where so strongly attracted to him. The same I think can be said for his music, the best of which is his original work and that is that it is authentic.
Scorsese for his part has done a good job of telling Dylan’s story. He has interwoven interviews, archival footage and performances into a mosaic that starts at the end in the beginning goes to the beginning and then comes full circle at the end. He doesn’t take really any artististic liberties with the film and it is good that he doesn’t. After all it is Dylan’s story and as artist he is no more than a mirror for reflecting the truth around him…I think Dylan would agree.
4 stars