Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by
Martin Scorsese **** / *****
Directed by: Martin
Scorsese.
If Bob
Dylan ever decides to truly open up, truly talk about his life, his career, his
tours, etc. – I have no idea what the result would be. Throughout his career,
his strategy has been to obfuscate, lie, mislead, misdirect, etc. everything
about his life and his work. He either isn’t prone to introspection, or at
least doesn’t actually want to share any of that with anyone – he’s happy to
keep the myth of himself out there instead of the real man. In that way, Martin
Scorsese’s “documentary” Rolling Thunder Revue, which documents the tour Dylan
and company embarked on in 1975 and 1976 – after he was away for a while, and
decided to come back and play small venues – is the perfect Bob Dylan
documentary. Because like Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic – I’m Not There – it keeps
the enigma in place, even while it enlightens so much. People have been varying
degrees of frustrated that Scorsese set out to “fool” them by including some
fictional material in the film – which, is kind of understandable. And yet,
Scorsese literally opens the film with people doing magic tricks – to fool the
audience – and if you cannot sniff out that the apparent filmmaker – Stefan Van
Dorp (played by Martin von Haselberg) is a fake, or tell that Sharon Stone’s
story is clearly false, then you really should know when actor Michael Murphy
shows up, playing Congressman Tanner, that this isn’t true. But hey, if you
fall for it all, that’s kind of the point. And even if Scorsese didn’t fake
some of this – do you really think we’re getting the truth from Dylan?
The film
that results from this odd approach therefore part documentary, part concert
film and part, I don’t know what. Scorsese has assembled the movie from some
truly remarkable concert footage by Howard Alk – which is some of the best
footage of Dylan live you will ever see. I have perhaps never seen him so great
live in any footage before this – and there are great versions of some of his
best songs here, which Scorsese for the most part let’s play out in full (or
nearly so). There is invaluable footage of Dylan – of Joan Baez, or Joni
Mitchell, of Rambling Jack, of Allan Ginsberg – and many others performing that
if nothing else would make this movie well worth seeing – that has been
restored to its glory, and assembled by Scorsese and editor David Tedeschi.
It’s remarkable – and of course, that’s real.
It’s
everything else you have to take with a grain of salt. There is, of course, the
fake interviews – sometimes people playing themselves, sometimes people playing
others – and then Scorsese also cuts in footage of Dylan’s own grand folly of a
movie – Renaldo & Clara – his nearly four-hour film made of the same tour,
where he and his wife played the title characters, interspersed with concert
footage, and other things. No one can see Renaldo & Clara of course – it
came out in 1978, to a confused or hostile response, and really hasn’t been
seen very much since. There are scenes in this movie that look slightly
different from the rest of the documentary footage – which probably comes from
that film, including a very strange scene between Dylan and Baez, which is an
uncharacteristically candid conversation between the two of them – which of
course, probably means it was fake.
All of
this is intercut with modern day interviews of course – and most of those are
real – or at least real-ish. Dylan himself is, of course, in on the joke of it
all – he talks about Van Dorp in those interviews, who of course wasn’t really
there. He also tries to claim he barely remembers the tour, and that it’s all
meaningless. And maybe, to Dylan, it is – which is why he and Scorsese
conspired to make this film this way.
How do I
feel about the fictional stuff – about the fact that other than the
performances in the film, you really cannot trust what’s real and what’s not
here? To be honest, a little frustrated. I would have preferred a straighter
documentary treatment of this material – even knowing that Dylan couldn’t be
trusted. And yet, I also know that this film, however much is faked, is
probably the “truer” version of Dylan. There’s a lot of talk about masks in the
film – about how if you want someone to tell the truth, give them a mask to
hide behind (they are paraphrasing Oscar Wilde here – so not a new observation).
And perhaps that’s all Dylan and Scorsese think they’re doing here – giving
Dylan a mask so he can tell the “truth”. I kind of wish at this late stage,
that Dylan would drop the mask – and be more forthright. But that ain’t going
to happen – he’s spent nearly 60 years doing the exact opposite, so this is
what we’re going to get.
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