Few cultural figures are so well known, yet fundamentally mysterious and unknowable, like Bob Dylan, which is probably why the music icon is such an irresistible subject for documentarians. Dylan’s career seems designed to frustrate classifiers and analysts – an eternal willingness to torch the past, reject your expectations, abandon what works with audiences, cross boundaries, and invent new personas, accompanied by openly fabricating about his life and intentions.
In some of his on-screen appearances, such as D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal “Don’t Look Back,” it feels like the more directly the camera focuses on him, the more determined Dylan is to squirm out of the spotlight. Like an eclipse, Dylan’s best viewed from an oblique angle.
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This elusive quality to Dylan makes Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” a paradoxically brilliant angle from which to examine the singer, since the tour it portrays deliberately obscured and played with Dylan’s enormous fame. The 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, taking place after Dylan’s large stadium shows with The Band, was crafted to provide a more intimate, experimental experience. Taking inspiration from musical variety shows of an earlier era and vaudevillian circus troupes to an extent, the tour saw Dylan relinquish headliner status to take part in a collective featuring many other gifted musicians, such as Joan Baez, T-Bone Burnett, The Byrd’s Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Mick Ronson from Bowie’s Spiders From Mars, Joni Mitchell, and more.
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But as Martin Scorsese is wont to do, this is no mere recontextualized rock concert documentary borrowing from previously shot and Dylan-made rock documentaries. Scorsese’s previous Dylan documentary “No Direction Home,” culled from “Don’t Look Back” and “Eat The Document” and created a new and vital portrait of this enigmatic artisan. “Rolling Thunder Revue” goes well beyond that and employs footage from the titular tour, but also from the quasi, semi-autobiographical, nearly 4-hour narrative movie Dylan made of the tour, “Renaldo & Clara” (1978), about the myth of the man himself.
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Taking cues from “Renaldo & Clara,” but never mentioning that film by name or using much of its narrative footage (originally “written” by Dylan and Sam Shepard; heavy stress on those air quotes), Scorsese plays with form, mischievously invents his own fictions and crafts a sprawling, rocking nearly 2-and-a-half-hour epic that is part treatise on American culture, part thunderous rock concert movie featuring so many reinvented classic songs and an embrace of Dylan’s slippery perspective on truth. You could almost call it Scorsese’s first experimental documentary.
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The beginning of the film highlights the tour’s emergence from the chaotic Greenwich Village art scene, here embodied in a Patti Smith performance. As the tour took to the road, it retained its essential Village roots, by bringing along non-musicians like Allen Ginsberg, as well as by shunning the spectacle of other rock music in favor of a more timelessly theatrical troubadour quality, best embodied by the tour’s copious use of masks and greasepaint (which seem to have been equally influenced by kabuki and KISS).
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Scorsese invents a funny, playful and greatly entertaining war in the center of the film too; a paranoid, antagonistic, precious filmmaker reticent to acknowledge Dylan’s genius and reluctance to cede control of his original footage to Scorsese and co. But the character is a fake news creation played by German performance artist (and Bette Midler’s husband) Martin von Haselberg, which lends ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ its tricksy qualities. Further inventions pop up here and there and we’ll let you discern what’s what, but all we’ll say is the freewheeling “Nashville” sensibilities of the film should make the (somewhat obscure) Robert Altman reference/scenes in the movie make sense.
Whatever the askew framing/reframing of the tour is, it’s refreshing and illuminating to see Dylan portrayed not as a solitary genius, but as a member of a collective, giving and taking with other artists. The fluid environment must have agreed with Dylan as well, evidenced by the passionate intensity of performances like “One More Cup of Coffee,” “Isis,” and “Hurricane.” Many of the film’s most entertaining and fascinating moments don’t center on Dylan at all, but on the fractious cast of characters who were either roped in or glommed on to the artistic free-for-all, from the aforementioned fraudulent filmmaker to a young Sharon Stone who crossed paths with Dylan in her mother’s company as a teenager. It’s hard to imagine current stars performing in such a spontaneous and uncontrolled setting, personified by having a luminary like Joni Mitchell join up mid-tour; she gives a tremendous, show-stopping backstage performance of the then-new “Coyote” that makes us hope Scorsese may document her genius one day. At the same time, Dylan was still the ringleader and the flattered rock star, a point hilariously driven home by the always-salty Joan Baez recalling how she dressed up as Dylan for a day and was immediately treated like a god by everyone around her.
A mix of frisky insincerity (the counterfeit creations) and the very earnest (the concert footage and the admittedly somewhat nebulous ideas of an increasingly troubled American spirit in 1975), Scorsese crafts a boisterous documentary unlike any he’s made so far.
Drawing from both recent and archival interviews, Scorsese does his best to impose order on the proceedings, but both he and Dylan throw their hands up when attempting to say what it all means. At over 160 minutes, the film is still shorter than many of the concerts it documents, but it could still do better to establish some of the basics– the importance of key contributors like McGuinn, Burnett, and Ronson is confusingly never established, and some minor details are given too much time. Still, some misplaced focus is inevitable in portraying such an unruly ensemble and in celebrating the chaos of the tour, Scorsese highlights its most special quality. Containing some of his most open reflections and most electric performances, “Rolling Thunder Revue” is a terrific addition to the Dylan film canon and an absolute must for Dylanophiles. [B+]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=iUD5snx-XOo
