The measure of the greatness of No Direction Home -- Martin Scorsese's impressionistic two-night portrait of Bob Dylan as a young man -- is how much the director's grand aspiration is realized in a film that feels more like a poem than a TV documentary.
A less ambitious biographer might have been content to tell viewers that Dylan captured the times in which he lived better than any other popular artist of his era, and leave it at that -- plus or minus stock archival images of social protest and bits of Dylan's most widely known songs. But Scorsese actually re-creates the excitement, contradictions and craziness of the times as a backdrop against which viewers can start to appreciate Dylan's Promethean effort of capturing the cultural lightning of the 1960s in his music, sense of theater, and life.
No Direction Home is not just another two nights in front of the tube. Even by the standards of PBS' American Masters -- the medium's finest biography series ever -- Scorsese's film is 3 1/2 hours of breathing air so rarefied compared to most television that it feels as if one is inhaling helium.
The documentary opens and closes as a concert film. Dylan is on tour with guitarist Robbie Robertson and the other musicians that would come to be known as The Band, a watershed musical group lucky enough to have its farewell concert preserved for the ages by Scorsese in his classic 1978 film, The Last Waltz.
The time and place: Manchester, England, 1966. Dylan and the band members tear into "Like a Rolling Stone," but instead of a roar from the crowd at the Dylan song that seemed to be playing everywhere that year, what one hears over the electronic distortion of the instruments is the sound of boos.
Dylan, the crown prince of American folk music, had set off a firestorm of criticism and debate when he "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival -- performing with a rock/blues band instead of acoustic guitar and harmonica. The opening concert sequence perfectly captures him reaping the whirlwind of his artistic evolution with concertgoers screaming "traitor" and "sellout" as he takes the stage in Manchester.
It is then that Scorsese quickly cuts back to Hibbing, Minn., and Dylan's childhood in the 1950s. What follows is a portrait of the artist as an extremely alienated young man. The images are consistently bleak, and Scorsese seems as intent on quickly getting through the period as Dylan was in moving away after high school graduation from the world that knew him as Robert Zimmerman.
