Scorsese uses a stellar supporting cast to help tell the story - Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur, the late Dave Van Ronk - but it is the riveting live performances by Dylan, vintage film that's been little seen before now, that make the point of how powerful, important and sweeping his work was.įrom 40 years away, the 64-year-old Dylan in a black leather jacket looks back on this young man and remembers aloud. From the stunning opening sequence of Dylan braying 'Like a Rolling Stone' at a 1966 British concert, 'No Direction Home' brings it all back home, showing this remarkable young man, wise and cunning beyond his years, impish, impudent, frequently high and impossibly brilliant. Scorsese uses Dylan himself as the narrator of the film, which follows about six years of his career. Even more than in 'Chronicles,' which as author he could control, in 'No Direction Home' Dylan reveals himself in ways he had never dared. But with the publication last year of his best-selling memoir, 'Chronicles,' followed by a surprising '60 Minutes' softball television interview by Ed Bradley, Dylan gave at least the impression that he was pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Minnesota.īut in Martin Scorsese's extraordinary four-hour documentary, 'No Direction Home,' which airs tonight and Tuesday on PBS, Dylan submits to a journalistic process that is wholly without precedent in his long and glorious career. He was the master of the put-on, bluffing with straight-faced fabrications, never letting the truth get in the way of a good story. What is it about Bob Dylan that makes people desperate to pin him down? Why were reporters so anxious to pigeonhole him, as if somehow that would hem him in and render him less dangerously unpredictable?

Chronicles by Bob Dylan