The Bob Dylan Documentary ‘No Direction Home’ Is The Best Martin Scorsese Film Of This Century

Today marks the 79th birthday of Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known to the world as Bob Dylan. On the precipice of his eighth decade on the Earth, he’s as busy as he’s ever been. He just scored his first number one single, has a new album about to drop, and the only thing that could derail his Never Ending Tour of 32 years and running is a global pandemic. Not bad Zimmy. 

Another landmark is the 15th anniversary of the first airing of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese’s excellent 2005 biographical documentary about the singer-songwriter’s early years. Originally broadcast as part of PBS‘s American Masters series, and currently available for streaming on Netflix, it tracks Dylan’s life from his youth in Minnesota through his confrontational UK tour in 1966. Footage from the tour serves as the picture frame around which we see the artist grow and evolve. Each new creative breakthrough is interrupted by a jump forward in time, as Dylan and his band (who later  became The Band) hit the stage and bring his thin, wild, mercury sound to life only to be rewarded with boos, insults and threats of bodily harm. 

For years Dylan tried to hide his origins, the grandson of Jewish immigrants and merchants in Minnesota’s Iron Range, a place so cold that “you slept in your clothes.” In a series of closely-shot interviews, he says he felt like he was born to the wrong family and didn’t have a past. Changing his name came easy. Change came easy. Later, the Irish folk singer Liam Clancy talks about him being a shapeshifter, while friend Tony Glover says the young musician was, “like a sponge,” sopping up different influences and personas. Dylan claims he can’t recall why he picked the surname by which he’s universally known, only saying, “It didn’t really happen any of the ways that I’ve read about.” I’m not sure I believe him.

Dylan moved to Minneapolis for college where he began playing folk music but was run out of town after stealing a grip of rare blues records from the future rock critic Paul Nelson. “I was ready for New York,” he says. Fellow folkies from his Greenwich Village days vividly flesh out the scene and the young performer who stood out from the crowd by writing his own material. Former singing partner and girlfriend Joan Baez says he would “write and write and write” and delivers the best and funniest Dylan impression you will ever see.

By the time of his second album, Dylan had begun writing topical songs which spoke of current events in Biblical terms. He became the darling of the Civil Rights movement and the organized left but is dismissive of the importance some people put on his “protest songs,” a term he detests. “To be on the side of people who are struggling for something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being political,” he says. He became uncomfortable with the expectations draped upon him and walked off the picket line. As the poet Allen Ginsberg says, “He pissed everybody off by not being a nice trained seal.”

In 1965, Ginsberg visited Dylan in London and found him in the company of The Beatles. He had begun growing his hair out and traded in his denim workwear for a leather jacket and sunglasses. Tired of watching other people have hit records with his songs, he began to imagine having his own. His new lyrics alternated between the personal, the poetic and the surreal. Bringing It All Back Home, his first of two landmark albums released that year, was half electric / half acoustic. His live appearance with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at that summer’s Newport Folk Festival enraged purists, with a third of the audience booing him. It set the tone for the year to come.

Released a month after the Newport fiasco, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album was the full flowering of his electric period and featured the hit single, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Pop stardom brought new levels of scrutiny from the press. The weirder their questions got, the weirder Dylan’s answers got until he finally gave up, answering everything with a curt “yes” or “no.” In early 1966, he embarked on a four-month tour of the U.S., Australia and Europe. Half the set would feature him performing solo with an acoustic guitar. Then, he would return to the stage backed by The Hawks, the hardscrabble Canadian-American musicians who would later become The Band.

In the UK, Dylan’s electric set was met with walkouts and antagonism by fans who thought it was a betrayal of all he had previously stood for. According to tour drummer Mickey Jones, when the band hit the stage they set out to “kick ass and take names,” sometimes performing in front of a giant American flag, perhaps a not so subtle fuck you to our former colonizers. Death threats were made against Dylan and bomb threats were called into venues. Despite the antipathy, the shows were well attended. A film crew accompanied them and captured the chaos.

No Direction Home climaxes with never before seen footage of Dylan and The Hawk’s legendary performance at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. The performance was widely bootlegged and erroneously said to have occurred at London’s Royal Albert Hall before its official release in 1998. Before their final number someone in the audience calls Dylan, “Judas!” “I don’t believe you,” he responds, then says, “You’re a LIAR!” He then turns to the band and instructs them, “Play it fucking loud!,” before crashing into the first chords of “Like a Rolling Stone.” It is electric.

Not only is No Direction Home one of the best rock documentaries of all-time, it might also be the best film Scorsese has made this century. He skillfully presents Dylan’s story in epic terms, intertwining it with 1960s American history in a way that is tangible and even inspiring without succumbing to self-congratulatory Boomer nostalgia. Neither he nor Dylan are afraid to present their subject in a ridiculous or bad light and the interviews with ex-girlfriends and others left behind add to the narrative and legend.

A week after performing in Manchester in 1966, Bob Dylan turned 25. The tour ended a few days later. On July 29, 1966, he was in a widely reported motorcycle crash, which may or may not have been serious, and used it as an opportunity to stop touring and reinvent himself again. “An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere,” Dylan tells us at one point. “You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming.”

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC

Watch No Direction Home on Netflix