No Direction Home: Bob Dylan review

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The Storyteller and the Rockstar

A film on a controversial icon of our generation has to be pulled into some sort of controversy. Though Dylan’s followers would outnumber his detractor any day but this man has something that makes him worth hating.

The documentary was not only criticized for not being true to the spirit of documentary film-making and reemphasizing the popular image of Dylan, a construct of mass media but some critics also doubt if it is an authentic Scorsese work. Though the project took off some eleven year back and Scorsese joined much later, still for those who are familiar with Scorsese's unique cinematic style would tend to agree; it’s quintessentially Scorsese’s vision of the icon.

The principal argument of the critics is Scorsese hasn’t even interviewed Bob Dylan himself for the film. A valid argument though, however, having seen the film, one would ask was there any need? A Dylan fan himself; he shares a deep understanding of the icon and the social climate that produced him. Here comes another criticism that social context is overemphasized to the extent that Dylan turns into a helpless product of social upheavals downplaying his individual genius. I tend to disagree as despite establishing Dylan on sound social ground, proclaiming him a need of an era of fear and turbulence, Scorsese doesn’t miss out on portraying his ordinariness as a young man, desperately seeking himself as an artiste. The journey of a young singer in search of inspiration that leads him into being an inspiration for an entire generation.

No direction home, Bob Dylan, is an artist’s vision of another artist. Scorsese’s ‘˜over-emphasis’ on social context probably could be taken as his humble admission to the fact that an artist’s works are not products of thin air nor is he himself. A man, who is singing songs of contemporary crisis of society, can’t be understood without a social context. In one of the radio interviews, used intelligently in the film, Dylan says, “I’m not a topical writer” but he claims that he writes beyond topics. The film not only portrays Dylan as a mass icon but it also underlines his journey from a restless young man to Bob Dylan.

Scorsese didn’t interview Bob for this film. Instead he uses archives, live performances, backstage, unsung songs and old interviews. The documentary had every possibility of ending up in bumble jumble of archival material, had Scorsese not been there. His mastery of playing around with time and space comes handy here and he invests the old footage and interviews with a new meaning.

Though this is hardly a comparison, having recently seen a documentary film on Indian Superstar Shahrukh Khan, I wonder if this film added anything to my understanding of the star. To my utter dismay, SRK, as he is popularly known, came out as a newspaper clipping that is printed and reprinted for popular consumption. His deep-seated sense of loss, insecurity and restlessness, appear taken directly from the popular mythology woven around him and reemphasized with some vague intellectual airs. All summed up from a life being lived in public domain but where is the star taken to critical scrutiny of a filmmaker, stripped of his stardom?

On the contrary, Martin’s portrayal of Bob Dylan evokes a sense of realism. Bob undoubtedly a genius, sounds more convincing as an icon within a social context. We see him grow. Impressions about him keep changing as he evolves. People who find him ordinary accept their failure to see the outstanding in him in the film. We also see the artist finding himself. His desperate search for inspiration and his discovery of self...Martin captures essence of the icon in his own unique style, where Bob and the society share a kind of equilibrium.

It’s a remarkable work of Martin Scorsese, well received by the followers of both, the filmmaker and the artiste. Definitely, a must in order to understand both, the poet-singer and the director. An artist, telling his own story through another.