ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE
DIRECTOR Martin Scorsese
CAST Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Scarlet Rivera, Joni Mitchell
PLOT Against the tumult of mid-’70s America, Bob Dylan takes a rag-tag band of musicians, poets, free thinkers and journalists across the US to play intimate venues to get closer to his audience. ALONGSIDE HIS CAREER as cinema’s best chronicler of New York underlife, Martin Scorsese has a nifty side hustle as a master Dylanologist. A spiritual sequel to 2005’s No Direction Home, which charted Bob Dylan’s golden years between 1961 and ’66, Rolling Thunder Revue follows the ramshackle 1975-’76 tour featuring music’s biggest stars playing shows in smaller auditoriums in less fashionable cities. But this being Scorsese, it’s more than just an in-concert film. Instead it triples up as a multi-faceted portrait of a creative artist, a prescient portrait of ’70s America in crisis, and a meditation on the nature of documentary itself.
In juggling performances, fly-on-thewall tour footage, a rare contemporary interview with Dylan and mini profiles of his retinue (poet Allen Ginsberg is a great dancer), the film is overstuffed, but you have to admire the ambition. With the folk scene of the ’60s on its last legs, Dylan’s decision to take a supergroup on the is partly motivated to show the “true American spirit” during a time of national crisis. Scorsese juxtaposes the backstage antics with footage of Saigon falling, bi-centennial protests, Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s assassination attempt. “Let America be America,” says a voice. “Let it be what it used to be.” It sounds suspiciously like Scorsese’s.
In stunningly scrubbed-up performance footage. Scorsese does full justice to the music, be it ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ (duet with Joan Baez), ‘Just Like A Woman’ (which Dylan tells a young Sharon Stone was written specifically for her even though it was written ten years before) or a blistering performance of ‘Hurricane’, the song about middleweight boxer Rubin Carter wrongfully imprisoned for murder. Yet the troubadours rarely look happier than in a tour bus covering The Clovers’ ‘Love Potion No. 9’. It is truly joyous.
What Rolling Thunder Revue doesn’t have is a compelling narrative shape — we trot to each venue with no sense of urgency — or on-screen drama (in this regard and this regard only, Dylan is no Luke Goss). But it’s an engaging, self-reflexive effort that has little truck with hagiography or objective truths; the contradictory views of Dylan build up at a dizzying rate. The film opens with a Georges Méliès short, Vanishing Lady, depicting a magic trick, hinting that what follows isn’t all it seems. “I don’t remember a thing about Rolling Thunder,” says Dylan to Scorsese’s camera. Which, along with Scorsese’s absorbing film, is proof he was really there. IAN FREER
VERDICT Scorsese is the Bob Dylan of cinema — poetic, truthful, idiosyncratic — and Rolling Thunder, despite some longueurs, is an important document of a major artist — by a major artist.