Autumn is a-comin' in, and it's time to fetch up some more of that smoky Dylan mystique. So it arrives: No Direction Home, a two-part "American Masters" profile airing on PBS on September 26 and 27, directed by Martin Scorsese, and mounted by the combined foundational forces of Apple Computer, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, WNET-TV, and a few others. (The film has already been issued on DVD, along with a double-CD soundtrack album.)
Like Anthology, The Beatles' standard-setting archival project, No Direction Home was made with the cooperation of the subject himself: Dylan is interviewed, as is virtually every still-living friend, associate, or collaborator of any significance to his early career. Additionally, Scorsese and his aides were given access to whole subcontinents of film and audio documentation, much of it lost long ago, or never logged until now.
You needn't be told the film is worth seeing for this material alone. There's vintage footage from Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan's first crucible; and later, Scorsese clearly loves constructing a grainy panorama of the Greenwich Village club scene during his subject's early times there. You see Dylan looking his meanest in a 1965 screen test at Andy Warhol's Factory, and a lengthy passage surveys the remains of that year's Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan's first appearance as a plugged-in rocker was met with boos and confusion. Among the interviewees, Al Kooper is still boyishly proud of his sneaky organ on "Like a Rolling Stone," Dave Von Ronk shines as the hearty raconteur, and a lifetime's worth of sweet sanity prevails whenever Joan Baez is interviewed -- though a plethora of clips drives home just what a blindingly banal singer she was.
But old snippets and well-told tales, however transfixing, are only pieces of something, not the thing itself; they're the pigment, not the painting. If your hope was that a Dylan-Scorsese collaboration would produce something other than a proficient mediocrity, prepare to be embittered. Otherwise you'll be thrilled to your short hairs. Myself, I could spit. Is it too much to ask that an elaborate superstar retrospective like this be, in addition to a treasure trove of rare sights and sounds, at least an attempt at a great movie? That -- given its importance, its novelty, and the fact that nothing quite like it will ever happen again -- it be the focus of a first-rate creativity, a field for risk and discovery, revision and heresy? No Direction Home is resolutely external and maddeningly superficial. Its point of view is not to have one. Scorsese squashes Dylan into a rock-doc tin can that, when opened, sighs nostalgically, tepidly: "Ah … baby boom."
This is the kind of devotional document that celebrates creativity by being as uncreative as possible, that respects great artworks by cropping them to fit the space allotted. There are many dazzling performances here, but because the film does not primarily care about the music, none is allowed to play through without being marred by premature cutting or overlaid narration. All the glory here is contained in the footage, shot by D.A. Pennebaker, of Dylan and the Hawks touring Europe and the U.K. in spring 1966. Beautifully restored for color and clarity, these scenes are spellbinding, both musically and dramatically. Alienated fans line up to curse Dylan for the camera while the band slams gamely away. Whether performing onstage or speed rapping outside a Glasgow pet store, Dylan is on the edge of hyperconsciousness, so sick and tired and drug-driven he is wired beyond safety. A crash waiting to happen, but the tension is exquisite.
Scorsese's brightest stroke is to use these historic performances as the film's leitmotif, cutting back to one dark U.K. stage or another every time the back story reaches an especially fraught point. Tragically, his final offense is to climax No Direction Home with Pennebaker's footage of perhaps the single most fabled live performance in rock history -- "Like a Rolling Stone" at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, May 17, 1966, the so-called Judas show -- and cutting, after just one verse, from the performance to a black screen and end credits. Imagine spotting Halley's Comet, then being forced to close your eyes.
That is the philistinism and bum instinct that deadens No Direction Home, that curdles and contains what should be a heady, virulent brew. Rather than the narrative of an artist's journey inside, to that place where Dylan created music of so essential and disturbing a nature that others could hate but never ignore it, this is something a lot smaller: the story of an ambitious and increasingly exhausted superstar, an overworked idol who winds up looking like the "before" in a Visine ad.
There was more driving Dylan than mere ambition, and we needn't quite reach for Allen Ginsberg's invocation of shamanism to perceive it. This was an artist who, early on, saw the world in all its wildness -- saw its untamed elements, its bestiality and bubbling undercurrents. When he figured out how to encode that wildness into his lyrics and, just as importantly, burn it into his electric sound, he made his best work. Where did those impulses come from, what was that process, what propelled its results outward from Dylan into the world?
Hints of this emerge through early kinescopes and films of such as Hank Williams, twanging and beaming over a sequined Opry jacket; Muddy Waters shuddering, snarling, working his mojo; Gene Vincent defying paralysis to swing his one good leg over a stand-up microphone; the ancient folk scholar John Jacob Niles caressing a dulcimer and wailing a murder ballad high and ghostly enough to chill your blood. It may be that all these freaky tics and animal dramatics make their return in Dylan's spastic arm throws and compulsive lip pursing throughout Pennebaker's live footage -- not to mention in the thrusting, wailing extremity of the music itself.
This should have been Scorsese's investigative agenda, but instead of exploring intangibles, he arranges data. Despite the craziness of this subject, this music, and these events, No Direction Home is a sane, straitjacketed presentation, honoring chronology and causality, making column-straight connections between artist and art, life and times -- despite the (obvious, one would have thought) fact that such an approach contradicts everything Dylan has ever said about how he views himself, his work, and the world in general. Characteristic of the banality of thought here is that the songs are constantly framed in the easiest available terms -- as political responses, or mere statements of autobiography. "Hard Rain" plays over shots of JFK and Khrushchev, "Don't Think Twice" over Dylan and an early girlfriend; meaning and feeling are repeatedly compressed in a one-to-one relationship between sound and image. The film doesn't know how to feel about an anomalous inspiration like "Mr. Tambourine Man" (except to place it as a break with the topical songwriting Dylan never copped to in the first place), or "Like a Rolling Stone," or the Blonde on Blonde songs, the creation of which are completely elided.
It's tempting to say that Dylan should have made this movie himself, except that his previous spins in the director's chair have been either incoherent and undernourished (Eat the Document, a one-hour cut-down of the 1966 Pennebaker reels) or incoherent and morbidly obese (Renaldo and Clara, a four-hour concert movie-cum-soap opera, Dylan's autoerotic version of Nashville). But what No Direction Home needs is precisely some filmic equivalent of Dylan's authorial voice in Chronicles, Volume 1 -- the gnarly, humorous, difficult tone of, as he rather puckishly calls himself here, the "musical expeditionary." It needs that discursiveness and sense of the mystic ordinary, memory's fog pierced by one man getting his own history to laugh and growl and do handstands, not just fall in line and behave.
Of course, this personal, impressionistic approach would call for a director who was willing to impose him- or herself on the holy scripture of Dylan's life and work -- reinterpret it wholesale, throw away some parts and magnify others, in effect create a Dylan nonexistent except in one person's imagination -- and do it with the objectivity, discipline, and sense of dramatic form that Dylan the filmmaker has never shown. But that work would never get on "American Masters," because "American Masters" doesn't run experimental films or bankroll personal visions. Its offering is creative patronage with a prestigious veneer, and Scorsese (who hasn't made a truly dangerous movie since The King of Comedy, if not Taxi Driver) effaces himself utterly before all the corporation money and foundation names and sanctioning of official history. Which means, I suppose, that No Direction Home isn't really directed by Scorsese at all; it's directed by “American Masters.”
These are lines from one of Dylan's greatest songs, "Series of Dreams": "In one, the surface was frozen / In another, I witnessed a crime / In one, I was running, and in another / All I seemed to be doing was climb." No Direction Home reflects in its frozen surface the most familiar, the most obvious of those dreams: Dylan running through the 1960s, and Dylan climbing the ladder to American idoldom. I kept wondering about the one where he witnessed a crime. A great, gutsy director with live nerves and bristling imagination would have taken this material and used it to meditate on the crime Dylan witnessed, who he thought committed it, and what he did about it.
Yes, this is "American Masters," where things aren't discussed that way. Yes, this is Martin Scorsese, whose mojo stopped working long ago. And no, the Dylan documentary I ask for could never exist, not under these circumstances. But because you can't have something doesn't mean you should stop wanting it -- let alone that you should settle for what you get.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
