A puzzle picture and ornate hoax, Martin Scorsese's 2019 Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue is long, crammed with spectacular musical performances, and, ultimately, baffling. Scorsese subtitle to the film is "A Bob Dylan Story", a clue at the outset that a third (or more) of what we see depicted on the screen is a tall tale and fictional, although presented with such persuasive documentary assurances that the viewer is bound to feel more than a little cheated upon discovering that much of the material, most conspicuously the "talking head" commentary is entirely invented. Viewers will either find this approach to material that is intrinsically compelling either fascinating or distracting or simply annoying. In an era where claims of "fake news" are weaponized, it is more than a little disconcerting to observe Dylan and Scorsese conspiring to invent their own mythology to enhance, or illumine, the indisputable reality of the famous Rolling Thunder Revue. In fairness, Dylan himself gives ample warning that the road ahead will be a devious one -- very early in the movie he makes two oracular pronouncement: he says he can't talk about the tour because it happened forty years ago, "before (he) was even born"; second, Dylan repeats the claim that a man wearing a mask is the only person upon whom you can count to tell you the truth. Fundamentally, Dylan's concept of truth telling seems rooted in a couple of sources. First, there is evidence that the singer is painfully shy and reticent, a Midwestern characteristic that forbids him from talking too expansively about himself and his work. (This is illustrated by a striking anecdote in which a girlfriend says that Dylan pleaded with her to "help him" when new people were about to appear -- a plea that she perceived to be based in Dylan's anxiety. Like much in the movie, there is only one problem with this story: it's fictional, told by the actress Sharon Stone, playing the role of "the Beauty Queen" as listed in the credits, but who, in real life, had nothing to do with the tour.) Second, Dylan's lyrics have always been enigmatic and, I suppose that the songwriter, tiring of offering interpretations, simply decided to either evade all questions of meaning or, in the alternative, proffer false responses -- this is apparent from Dylan's insistence throughout his career that "the meaning is in the words", that is, the songs speak for themselves and are, indeed, the only evidence of what they really mean. Finally, Dylan views show business as inherently deceitful -- performers pretend to be something that they are not. In recognition of this notion, Dylan's own efforts at documenting his musical tours have generally relied upon extremely arcane fictional narratives. His own film displaying footage from the Rolling Thunder Revue, Renaldo and Clara, was some kind of improvised melodrama featuring Joan Baez (as Clara) passionately attempting (without much success) to elicit some kind of emotional response from the distant Dylan (named Renaldo). Renaldo and Clara is never mentioned in the Scorsese film, although much of the concert footage seems extracted directly from that film -- and Dylan's 1978 movie, much derided by critics, must be regarded in some respects as the primary source material for an understanding of Rolling Thunder Revue. (Renaldo and Clara is actually much better than it looks on first blush; I should know -- I saw the movie with a roommate who is a Dylan fan three times and the picture is more than four hours long. I suspect that most of the movie was shot and designed under the influence of drugs and the picture is beautifully shot and, in fact, seems portentously meaningful, if you watch it while smoking marijuana.) Sam Shepherd was brought on board to script Renaldo and Clara but quickly found that there was nothing for him to do -- Dylan insisted on improvising the whole thing, a questionable decision based upon a very fraught and, even, cringe-worthy exchange displayed by Scorsese as a sort of exhibit from the earlier movie: the sequence involves dialogue between the songwriter and Joan Baez in which both of them appear to be acting, although not at all persuasively. It should be noted that Dylan's more recent pseudo-concert film, Masked and Anonymous (2003) was similarly enigmatic and featured evasive fictional narrative as well. In that film, Dylan adopts archetypal poses and performs in a stoic, bland, and deliberately non-expressive manner. Accordingly, Scorsese pays homage to Dylan's famous elusiveness exemplified in earlier pictures by staging a third of his film as an elaborate confidence game.
The reality of the situation, something not readily discerned from the proceedings on stage, is that Dylan formed a touring company in October 1975 -- the company originally included Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson from David Bowie's band, David Mansfield, Scarlet Rivera playing gypsy violin, T Bone Burnett, 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Allan Ginsberg to recite poems, and Joan Baez, who may have been Dylan's lover at the time, although they both seem to have been married to other people during the tour. The plan was to begin the tour at Plymouth and play smaller venues in the Northeast, particularly Boston and Connecticut. Dylan apparently wanted to restore his connection with the audience and engaged houses that held about three to four-thousand spectators. (Economically, this plan was a recipe for failure -- the venues couldn't support Dylan's huge band and his entourage which traveled by bus.) The tour ended with a show at Madison Square Garden in New York, a benefit for Ruben "Hurricane" Carter, the contender for boxing middle-weight championship of the world, a man that Dylan felt had been wrongly accused and imprisoned for murder. (Carter makes a flamboyant appearance in the movie.) The tour was rebooted in the Spring and played in the southwest -- when the last show was performed at Salt Lake City in May 1996, it was generally thought that the energy among the performers was exhausted and, even, soured and the final concerts were said to be listless affairs. Scorsese's film suggests that the tour was a quest, a venture in self-realization, in which each participant was driven to become "the most extreme version of his (or her) self." Along the way, the tour accumulated camp followers and other performers who played with the Revue for a week or two, most notably Joni Mitchell. Scorsese's film begins with Fourth of July celebrations in 1976, in effect after the tour was completed, and shows the so-called tall ships encircling Manhattan with the twin towers rampant overhead. Only after reading about the tour do I now understand that these opening scenes are taken out of context -- the tour was, in fact, done by the time of the Bicentennial, although Scorsese and Dylan collude to suggest that the concerts were all played in honor the nation's 200th birthday. In fact, the opening concert scenes, shot at Folk City in New York, were filmed a year earlier in on October 23, 1975. This sequences begins the film with a bravura series of performances: Patti Smith works herself into an ecstasy while Bette Midler looks on sarcastically and, then, flirts with Dylan -- Patti and Bob exchange gibberish. The Rolling Thunder Revue scenes are exquisitely shot and Scorsese allows the footage to roll throughout the entirety of the musical numbers performed -- he rarely cuts away from extremely close shots of Dylan. In the tour, Dylan took to wearing masks for his first number, casting the disguise aside for the second tune "It Ain't Me, Babe", and, later, appears in elaborate "white face" resplendent under a glacially white John B. Stetson hat decorated with roses and, in one case, a peacock's plume. Dylan was at the height of his powers on this tour -- his voice is clear as a bell and he twists and mangles his lyrics to wring the maximum meaning from them. Often, he pantomimes aspects of his songs and rolls his eyes like a Kabuki actor making fierce faces. In fact, the attack on the songs is best characterized as "fierce" even fearsome -- his account of the ballad about Hurricane Carter is rapid-fire and actually sounds like a wild, lethal tempest. Scarlet Rivera accompanies Dylan's singing with vaguely middle-Eastern riffs on her violin: she has a serpent painted on her forehead and her cheeks are glazed white. (Dylan tells us straight-faced that she had a trunk "with all sorts of things inside including chains and mirrors, daggers and candelabra, and, even, a snake". Other informants say that she wore a sword like a pirate and anyone who tried to grope her got himself cut.) The music is fantastic, although I think most of that imagery, comes full cloth out of Renaldo and Clara -- I vaguely recalled some of the concert footage from that film.
The fictional apparatus accompanying the monumental and awe-inspiring musical material is often tedious. Dylan and Scorsese invent a European film maker, Stefan von Dorp, who claims to have shot all of the film used in the movie and denounces the documentary's producers for stealing his footage (the footage, in fact, comes from Dylan's Renaldo and Clara as I have earlier observed). Van Dorp is plausible and I thought he was a real person: in fact, the entire character is imaginary -- the role is played by Martin von Haselberg, the German performance artist married to Bette Midler and formerly one of the anarchic Kipper Kids. Sharon Stone appears, recounting that she was brought to a concert by her mother, and stayed to join the entourage as a groupie. This is completely fictional although again, it seems, plausible. An unnecessary digression involves Dylan's relationship with Jimmy Carter -- we see Carter fawningly quoted the singer and, then, with him at the White House (the foil it should be said for the gloomy Dick Nixon and his protégée, Gerald Ford who appear briefly in newsreel footage). Michael Murphy appears as Tanner, the fictional congressman, and there's an entire anecdote about the legislator attending Dylan's show in Niagara Falls that is invented out of the whole cloth. Dylan often appears at the wheel of his bus, driving with a cigarette in his hand like a latter-day Neil Cassidy -- I doubt very much that Dylan actually drove the tour bus, although the film suggests this is true -- again, I think it's an evasion: someone asks: "Where was Bob?" with the reply given "always driving the tour bus." The film is filled with weird information, but I can't tell to what extent it is true: for instance, someone asked Mick Ronson what he thought of Dylan and the English guitar player replied: "I don't know. He never said a word to me." Entwined with made-up material is footage that seems realistically documentary -- Joan Baez muses ruefully on Dylan's charisma while seemingly implying that the man himself is a complete asshole. Joni Mitchell sings "Coyote" in a spectacular improvised sequence. In the end, Allen Ginsberg pronounces the film's farewell -- he suggests that the tour was a visionary quest and that it made each participant (and the audiences) into the persons that they should have been, that is, their best and truest selves. This is an inspiring conclusion and gives heartfelt meaning to Dylan's words that the tour resulted in nothing, that it's just "dust and ashes" -- his point being, I think, that we can't dwell in the past but that we must use our memories, which now are about a world that no longer exists, to propel us into a new and better future. Dylan has never dwelt in the past -- he looks forward always to the next day and the day after that: if you are not busy being born, you are busy dying and this notion, I think, accounts for the singer's refusal to dwell on events that happened more than forty years ago. It's all in the music, Dylan would insist, and this is made evident in the final number, a wild-eyed and half-hysterical version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Gate" in which Dylan and Roger McGuinn mug like Maori warriors. Greil Marcus called Dylan's work with the Band at Big Pink and his Rolling Thunder Revue reversions to the "old weird America" of traveling jug bands, medicine shows, religious revivals, and snake-oil salesmen, all of this with a stiff dose of Melville's The Confidence Man thrown in to boot. And this is what you will find in this current Netflix film. The whole thing is vaguely, and curiously, uplifting -- particularly the list of Dylan's tour venues from the Rolling Thunder Revue to 2018. Indefatigably, the artist continues to play 150 to 200 shows a year.
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