Classic DVD Review: Bob Dylan's No Direction Home

So, you’ve read “Chronicles: Volume One” cover to cover, backward and forward, you even cut out the pages and rearranged it so you could read it chronologically. You have the lyrics to “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” sharpied on a big posterboard tacked to your wall, you even explicated it like 11th grade English class. You have every album on vinyl and the entire Bootleg series, you even have the entire Woody Guthrie discography. But nothing, you still can’t figure out Bob Dylan. Sorry Charlie, but I ain’t got good news for ya: Dylan is still trying to figure out Dylan and even if he has, he ain’t gonna tell nobody.

Dylan’s got the whole world dancing in his puppet show and uses Martin Scorcese’s No Direction Home to flaunt it. The film is a collection of interviews with former Dylan cohorts and clips from past documentaries compiled to produce a mosaic of an enigma. But you can’t capture Dylan. The whole film feels like three different Dylans have pulled your bottom lip over your eyes while speaking in tongues and sprinkling you with salt. And the whole time Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Bob Neuwirth, and a host of others are shaking their heads in bewildered laughter like you’re at a funeral dressed for a luau and Dylan’s doing the hula. Dylan does what he wants, leaving the rest of us to catch our breath. As Allen Ginsberg says in the film, Dylan is like “a column of air.”

No Direction Home is Scorcese’s way of unraveling the yarn Dylan has balled up over the years and figuring out where it starts and where it’s headed. But he could unravel only up until the Judas incident, Dylan’s 1966 crucifixion at London’s Royal Albert Hall. He could only unravel where Dylan came from and where he got to, but not how he got there or where he’s going. Only Dylan has any idea of that. As he states in the film’s exposition: “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, so I’m on my way home.”

Do not watch this film because you think you know Dylan, that you’re just like Dylan, that you’re the only person who understands Dylan. Watch this film because you don’t know Dylan. Watch to see the chameleon change colors, to see the bags sink under his eyes and the babyfat wither from his cheeks. Watch to see his eyes hold his audience, first in uplift then in contempt. Watch to see him giggle like a schoolboy when Steve Allen calls him a genius. Watch to hear Dave van Ronk accuse Dylan of stealing his version of “House of the Rising Sun.” Watch for the Judas scene where Dylan sneers in retort “I don’t believe you, you’re a liar!” Watch because you never saw the pressures of being Dylan until you see him rub his face and confess ”I just wanna go home.”

Sure, you could drop $30 to see I’m Not There. But wouldn’t you rather watch Dylan’s Cheshire Cat grin when he calls himself “a song-and-dance-man” than Cate Blanchett’s imitation? Wouldn’t you rather look at an original Pollock than a replica, even if you see the paint but can’t understand the layers?