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The sheer variety of documentaries about Bob Dylan suggests an unsolvable thriller, a large occasion that calls for interrogation. It’s a remedy in any other case reserved for the JFK assassination and World Conflict II.
Dylan’s life is usually seen in discreet, impactful occasions—going electrical, his motorbike accident, the nation album, et al.—and tying them collectively is tough when the topic resists being nailed down, as Dylan does. The deeper these movies dive into his life, music, and legacy, the much less clear he can grow to be. Elevated scrutiny will make most lives appear multifaceted, much less of a single story and extra a tangled ball of intersecting experiences. Dylan is that to the nth diploma.
How do you even succinctly describe him? Musician? Definitely. But in addition, artist and activist. Poet. Cultural icon. Actor. Extra reverential and contemptuous phrases have additionally been used. Prophet. Anarchist. Evangelist. Judas. These titles don’t go away a lot area for the human, father, husband, or pal.
Dylan’s shifting facades have fascinated followers for many years, and these motion pictures try to search out some type of reality about why he has so insistently captured our consideration. Although “reality” is one thing Dylan—and a few of the filmmakers—would certainly chuckle at. It’s as subjective as this checklist. With that in thoughts, let’s rank greater than 50 years of documentaries concerning the, I don’t know, troubadour? Visionary? Charlatan? About Bob Dylan.
12. World Tour 1966: The Residence Films (2003)
It could be simple to dismiss World Tour 1966. It’s a documentary about Dylan with out a lot Dylan in it. Regardless of his absence and the fact that his “going electrical” second has been nicely documented elsewhere (see under, repeatedly), there’s nonetheless a recent perspective right here.
World Tour 1966 facilities on 8mm dwelling motion pictures shot by authentic Hawks (later dubbed “the Band”) drummer Mickey Jones, who talks at size about being a part of Dylan’s first electrical reveals. Jones goes deep into being recruited by Dylan, the Band’s evolution, assembly the Beatles, and fan vitriol. There are additionally often charming moments that really feel like a relative describing their “trip of a lifetime,” like when Jones talks about sightseeing between reveals and seeing the altering of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
11. Competition (1967)
Director Murray Lerner made greater than a dozen music documentaries throughout his profession, with topics similar to Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Miles Davis. Nonetheless, Competition could be his most interesting work. His means to seize the spirit of a live performance is on show as he shares 4 years of footage from the Newport People Competition, together with performances and interviews with artists like Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Howlin’ Wolf, Son Home, Johnny Money, and, in fact, Bob Dylan.
It’s an attractive movie, however Dylan isn’t its topic. He flits out and in of the image, a fleeting however inextricable presence. Nevertheless, the moments he’s current are vital. The 1963-’66 time-frame consists of Dylan transitioning from acoustic to electrical units, accompanied by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. There are additionally less-than-enthusiastic responses from Newport attendees and one promoter so indignant he needs to kill the stage’s energy with an axe.
10. Renaldo & Clara (1978)
In line with the Band’s Levon Helm, Dylan virtually bailed on Martin Scorsese’s The Final Waltz partly as a result of he had just lately completed Renaldo and Clara. Dylan directed that four-hour movie about his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, a kind of selection present that includes an entourage of acquainted musicians, poetry readings, and different on-stage antics that always noticed his musical menagerie adorned in costumes, facepaint, and masks.
Each critics and audiences had been powerful on the film, and it’s not laborious to see why. Renaldo and Clara is lengthy and lacks focus. There’s live performance footage, cinéma vérité-style passages, staged interviews, person-on-the-street interviews about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s wrongful imprisonment, and scripted vignettes that by no means coalesce right into a single imaginative and prescient. Nonetheless, there are entertaining moments and glimpses into the director’s thoughts.
9. Onerous Rain (1976)
Onerous Rain is one more documentary making an attempt to seize the kaleidoscopic magic of the Rolling Thunder Revue. This time, it’s extra strictly a live performance movie. Rolling Thunder started in 1975 and, after a break, commenced a second stretch of reveals within the spring of 1976, crossing the south and midwest. By many accounts, that spring didn’t carry the identical cacophonous celebration because the tour’s earlier dates.
Onerous Rain was shot throughout one wet present in Fort Collins, Colorado, as private issues had been surfacing. Dylan doesn’t exhibit the identical exuberance felt earlier within the tour, however that considerably dour demeanor makes it compelling. As an alternative of pictures from the viewers, wide-angle embraces of the stage, or a broader sense of the day, viewers are repeatedly given tight pictures of Dylan’s stoic face, making a provocative intimacy, whether or not he’s alone or sharing the microphone with Joan Baez. Regardless of the raucous preparations, there’s stress in stellar performances of “Shelter From the Storm” and “Fool Wind.”
8. The Different Facet of the Mirror: Bob Dylan on the Newport People Competition (2007)
In 2007, Lerner revisited his Newport People Competition footage to create The Different Facet of the Mirror. The movie collects Dylan’s units from 1963 to ‘65, successfully crafting a portrait of his evolution from Woody Guthrie-like folks famous person to the style’s Benedict Arnold. It’s a delight to see Dylan transfer from main an all-star collaboration of “Blowin’ within the Wind” one yr to, in one other, main a plugged-in, virtually psychedelic “Maggie’s Farm” that bursts from the pageant audio system bearing its tooth. After all, simply because it supplies a lens into Dylan’s evolution, it’s also possible to see the evolution of his fan reception.
7. Eat the Doc (1972) and 65 Revisited (2007)
Whereas these movies are totally different, each are round an hour lengthy, laborious to search out, and at the least partially helmed by D.A. Pennebaker. 65 Revisited showcases unseen footage and performances from Pennebaker’s seminal Don’t Look Again, which documented Dylan’s 1965 tour of the U.Okay. It additionally presents an alternate model of the enduring video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
Eat the Doc, which credit Dylan because the director, happens throughout a U.Okay. tour the next yr and options the Free Commerce Corridor “Judas” incident in addition to a short limo trip with John Lennon. Cinematographer and editor Howard Alk called Pennebaker’s original cut “Don’t Look Again, Revised.” When Dylan recovered from his 1966 motorbike accident, Alk and Dylan made their very own edit. When it screened on the Whitney in 1972, Alk’s program notes stated, “As an alternative of attempting to re‐create the ‘actual’ occasion, with a vérité documentary strategy, the editors regarded for what every shot itself needed to be.” His notes reveal a part of why Eat the Doc feels unfocused and slight in comparison with Don’t Look Again.
6. Hassle No Extra — A Musical Movie (2017)
Usually derided and ceaselessly dismissed, Dylan’s so-called Christian trilogy—Sluggish Practice Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love—was given a highlight for reassessment with the 2017 Bootleg Collection launch Hassle No Extra 1979–1981, which was accompanied by this documentary.
From the beginning, Hassle No Extra positions his evangelical flip as analogous to his early electrical units by together with audio of followers disinterested on this new Dylan. It’s primarily footage from his gospel-infused 1980 tour, homing in on the music and forgoing his apocalyptic lectures. Nevertheless, it does juxtapose performances with quick scenes of actor Michael Shannon delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons in a dimly lit church. It feels as odd because it sounds—till it finds a rhythm and builds the sense that Dylan didn’t merely love gospel or non secular music, however was rife with perception and keenness.
5. Attending to Dylan (1986)
The BBC’s Omnibus adopted Dylan’s sequence of bizarre ‘80s choices to the set of the poorly obtained 1987 movie Hearts of Hearth, which starred Dylan alongside Rupert Everett and Fiona Flanagan. The title of the 50-minute episode alludes to a philosophical quest to search out the soul of the artist. It additionally alludes to the crew’s uncertainty about attending to interview the mercurial star.
Luckily, each missions succeeded to various extents. Host Christopher Sykes interviews an adversarial Dylan, killing time between takes. “I’ve come via good instances and dangerous instances, you realize,” he tells Sykes. “I’m not fooled by good instances or dangerous instances.” The musician-turned-actor presents non-answer after non-answer in an interview that shifts from playful jousting to clear-eyed confrontation and again once more. “I’m attempting to fulfill your must probe into my non-public life and ideas right here in a approach that’s not going to embarrass me,” Dylan says. It’s a short however engrossing portrait of Dylan stepping out of his consolation zone in additional methods than one.
4. I’m Not There (2007)
Todd Haynes’ Oscar-nominated I’m Not There isn’t a documentary, however its experimental strategy cares much less about linear narratives than unearthing one thing true about Dylan, fictionalized although he could also be.
It options six actors enjoying Dylan or, maybe extra precisely, some small facet of Dylan’s persona or profession. Nevertheless, none of them are named Bob Dylan. Marcus Carl Franklin performs a train-hopping boy who goes by Woody Guthrie. Ben Whishaw performs Arthur Rimbaud at a press convention. Cate Blanchett’s Jude is a thinly veiled Dylan circa ‘65, with recreations of moments from Don’t Look Again and Dylan’s Newport performances. Richard Gere is Billy the Child, a reference to Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 western Pat Garrett and Billy the Child, during which Dylan appeared. (Kris Kristofferson, who performed Billy the Child for Peckinpah, narrates right here.) I’m Not There is unequivocally fictional. But it recreates scenes first captured in documentaries, blurring the already hazy line between fiction and non-fiction in movie. (Additionally, make a film about Allen Ginsberg starring David Cross already.)
3. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019)
Given the number of movies mentioned right here, it’s stunning that the weirdest is, on the floor, an easy documentary directed by Scorsese. It spotlights beforehand unseen footage and performances—a lot of it from Renaldo and Clara—from the tour, together with a ravishing rendition of “Isis” pre-Want. It additionally contains a new interview with a still-evasive Dylan. In an archival scene, Ginsberg says Dylan’s conception of the tour was to “present how stunning he’s, by displaying how stunning we’re.” In these phrases, Scorsese captures the tour’s playful, collaborative, anything-goes spirit.
“When somebody’s sporting a masks, he’s gonna inform you the reality,” Dylan says at one level. It seems like one thing Dylan would say, not a cue that one thing is amiss. The line evokes Orson Welles’ devilish promise within the documentary F for Pretend: “Throughout the subsequent hour, every thing you hear from us is admittedly true,” he says in his acquainted baritone, opening a 90-minute film that accommodates half-hour of bullshit.
Likewise, a very good chunk of Rolling Thunder Revue is a ruse. The Dutch filmmaker who speaks at size about filming the tour and his relationship with Dylan? He doesn’t exist. Sharon Stone’s story of winding up backstage at 19? The fictional live performance promoter? Former politician Jack Tanner? (Cue Jonathan Frakes) Pure fiction. At its greatest, these strikes might be seen as an homage to Dylan’s tendency to wind folks up. At its worst, it may really feel Trumpian in its dedication to the bit.
2. No Course Residence (2005)
Created for PBS’ American Masters sequence, Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour artifact often is the definitive movie on Dylan’s profession. The director delves deep into his topic’s life and music, tracing his Minnesota roots to smokey Greenwich Village venues and his gasp-inducing foray into electrical guitars.
Scorsese makes use of a great deal of Pennebaker’s footage because the glue between archival concert events and interviews with figures like Peter Yarrow, Seeger, and Baez. Extra importantly, No Course Residence options Dylan talking on his profession within the early ‘00s. Although, once more, the interviews are performed by Dylan’s supervisor and never Scorsese. Dylan is uncharacteristically open and, at the least seemingly, sincere, if nonetheless cagey as ever. Whereas prolonged, the film tries to do lots, together with showcasing moody solo acoustic performances and the bombastic power of early reveals with the Hawks.
1. Don’t Look Again (1967)
Arguably Pennebaker’s best work, Don’t Look Again is a traditional of cinéma verité, a mode that tries to get at reality via a extra naturalistic type of filmmaking. You received’t discover interviews, speaking heads, or an intrusive director. It presents a backseat trip to Dylan’s 1965 U.Okay. tour with concert events, rehearsals, a resort room argument with Donovan, and iconic situations of Dylan toying with the press.
Whereas it’s not loaded with info or insights from the individuals who had been there, it’s as intimate a portrait of the artist as has ever been created. The attractive black-and-white movie doesn’t serve up a fleet of details about Dylan’s profession or try to put him in a bigger cultural context. Nonetheless, viewers emerge with a sense of what it was prefer to be in Dylan’s orbit, a sense of who he’s in ways in which different documentaries—even by Pennebaker himself—have by no means been in a position to duplicate. With a topic as thorny and elusive as Dylan, it’s a Herculean feat.
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