By Melissa Moody
It’s difficult to imagine that the skinny kid singing hesitantly into the microphone in Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home” would become one of the most influential musicians of all time – as difficult, perhaps, as it was in 1945 to imagine that we would could put a man on the moon.
Bob Dylan transformed the shape of American music with simple guitar chords and the anti-establishment rhetoric that defined the ’60s.
Taking a cue from Woody Guthrie, the folk minstrel of working-class America and Bob Dylan’s self-professed hero, Dylan was labeled early in his career as a topical songwriter, voicing the anger and frustration of a generation. Songs like “Blowin’ in the wind,” and “The times they are a-changin'” became rallying cries of generational revolt, providing an anthem to civil rights awakening.
Dylan’s music was more than tunes you could sing along to, although you could sing along. It became a part of American culture.
“No Direction Home,” directed by Martin Scorsese (“Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas”), is a masterful collage that reveals Dylan at the start, 1961-1966, of a storied career in music. It imparts the story of a boy born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the mining town of Hibbing, Minn., striking out to find a new road.
The film documents an artist who is constantly transforming, seeking every opportunity to create and re-create himself.
In the DVDs, Dylan narrates the story of his life, and the life of a generation. Interviews with Dylan in the ’60s, as well as interviews with a more mature Dylan, are interspersed with clips from previously unreleased concert footage and studio sessions.
A collection of interviews with artists that influenced him and artists that collaborated with him provide insight into Dylan’s musical career.
Scorsese flawlessly intertwines the footage by placing it in the larger context of the social, political and cultural reality of the time.
Clips from the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have A Dream” speech, feature a young Dylan singing earnestly from the podium. The two-disc DVD depicts Dylan in the midst of the environment that he helped create and that helped create him.
Dylan was embedded in activism from the start of his career. His music attacked politics and a society that chose to turn a blind eye to the oppressed and outraged. Placed outside the context of the time, the music does not and could not carry the resonance it is known for.
Even for those of you who are not fans of Dylan’s music, “No Direction Home,” offers insight into a decade in America that irrevocably altered the the U.S. and the world.
Scorsese’s documentary captures the living, breathing atmosphere of the ’60s in America, while trailing Dylan as though he is thread that holds the decade together.
