No Direction Home New
Martin Scorsese is uniquely placed to tackle the riddle of Bob Dylan

By Nakul Krishna

The most remarkable thing about Bob Dylan is how much Dylan there is. So much, in fact, that any two people professing to be fans might find themselves fans of quite different people. The Dylan of today playing keyboard is not much like Dylan the Born Again Christian, who is not like Dylan the rock-star of Like A Rolling Stone . And none of these Dylans looks much like the Dylan in Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan .

Martin Scorsese happened to be among the editors assigned to wade through the copious footage that was later to become the Woodstock documentary. His films' rock soundtracks doubled as soundtracks for the lives of a film-watching generation that came of age as the '60s counterculture faded. He appears almost uniquely placed to tackle the riddle of Bob Dylan.

No Direction Home works with black and white footage and recent interviews, each offering a different Dylan. There he is, the Dylan with puppy fat. And the Dylan with the acoustic guitar and the 'weird contraption' for the harmonica. And a stoned Dylan, and, in a moment Scorsese keeps returning to, the Dylan of 1965, armed with electric guitar and the Band. “What happened to Woody Guthrie,” an angry audience member asks. What happened to Woody Guthrie indeed.

We can never be sure. Dylan gets to say a good deal, but he never says enough for us to know his mind. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger -- veterans of the folk scene and fellow inheritors of Woody Guthrie's tradition of trade union ditties -- are good-humoured about their frustration. Dylan busts the party because he will not toe the party line that Baez and her friends in the Old Left orthodoxy live by. He'll sing his songs, but count him out of the ‘other stuff'. No old-fashioned politicking for him. The music was the message, and that was all the message he had the patience for.

One wonders if by ending his story when he does, Scorsese implies that the Dylan of the early-'60s is the only one that counts. A more committed fan would baulk at the thought, pointing out the endlessly creative songwriting that was to follow through the '70s to the present, when he has produced an autobiography to add to his literary (was there ever a doubt his music was literary?) oeuvre. Chronicles only adds layers to the mystique. Unfortunately for those who like their icons to live out lives from a classical manual of celebrity, Dylan authors his own manual, and it is likely only he knows what it says.