No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

Best Dylan documentary ever
Found this at The Rogovoy Report (He is a cultural critic for WAMC Northeast Public Radio)

I've seen the complete No Direction Home Martin Scorsese documentary, upcoming on American Masters on PBS in a couple of weeks (9/26-27), and it's really great. I didn't realize that it includes extensive new interview footage with Bob Dylan himself, appearing in his most straightforward, seemingly normal role EVER -- even more than on the 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley -- normal enough almost to take him at his word on his extensive comments on particular songs, his background, incidents in his career, etc.

The film includes terrific interviews with dozens of key figures from Dylan's life and career, including Izzy Young, Harold Leventhal, Joan Baez, Paul Nelson, Bob Neuwirth, Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne, Pete Seeger, Mark Spoelstra, Suze Rotolo , and fortunately, Allen Ginsberg and Dave Van Ronk when both of them were still around.

The film also includes a...

Not my review, but that of a UK viewer
I was very frustrated by the lack of credible reviews, so I hunted down a review from the UK Observer newspaper:

"Bob Dylan is a private man who is notoriously camera shy. The TV interview he gave around the publication of his autobiography, Chronicles, last year was his first in two decades, so there was some surprise when Martin Scorsese announced he was making the definitive TV biopic with the man's full co-operation. It seems that in his sixties, Dylan - who has spent so much of his career laying false trails and telling downright lies about himself - has decided it's time to set the record straight and get his version of his life and times on the record, both in print and on film. And Scorsese, who directed The Last Waltz, the 1977 film about Dylan's former backing group, the Band, was the obvious man to do it.

Almost four hours long, No Direction Home deals only with the early part of Dylan's career, ending in 1966 and the tumultuous world tour on which he...

As good as it gets
When you get to the end, you want to start all over again. That's the No. 1 reason to own the DVD version of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home." Coming from a project so awash in audio and video treasures, it seems odd that the only meaningful extras are complete versions of Dylan numbers trimmed in the documentary. That said, there are some great performances in the extras -- for example, the 8-minute version of "Like a Rolling Stone" with the band that became the Band.

The DVD's Dolby Digital 5.1 audio achieves reference quality. Images are TV-friendly full screen, with pleasing grays and medium contrasts. The video texture is amazingly consistent given the Babylon of sources.

The film's subtitle should be something like "Bob Dylan, 1960-65." Dylan acts as his own witness throughout -- at ease, clear, sometimes funny and seemingly pleased to take control of his legend. "I don't feel like I had a past," Dylan says, but the assembled evidence proves...

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