Rolling Thun­der Revue: A Bob Dylan Sto­ry by Mar­tin Scorsese

Mar­tin Scors­ese knows that the mag­ic of cin­e­ma derives from ambiva­lence. And that’s the ambiva­lence he extends towards the char­ac­ters in his films. Deal­ing in absolutes offers no val­ue for the view­er, as it means there are no blanks to be filled or no fine shades to be imag­ined. There is lit­tle doubt that Scors­ese has pro­found wells of respect for Bob Dylan – as both one of the great liv­ing artists and as a supreme­ly enig­mat­ic cul­tur­al drifter who exists in a world that is par­ti­tioned off from both his ador­ing pub­lic and, it tran­spires, those who believe they have pen­e­trat­ed his inner circle.

Rolling Thun­der Review: A Bob Dylan Sto­ry is about the con­cen­tric inner cir­cles with­in the inner cir­cle, those opaque lay­ers which shield the mys­tery of this man from finite inter­pre­ta­tion. There are no firm assess­ments to be made about who Dylan is, the nature of his tem­pera­ment or what dri­ves him as a song­writer and per­former. But there is enough here to tan­ta­lise us into accept­ing his oth­er­world­ly genius, and to make us realise that there is no val­ue in feel­ing like we are clos­er to this who this per­son is.

Before we dive into the wider con­text of the film, let’s drill down on a sin­gle, inti­mate episode that arrives maybe three quar­ters of the way in: Dylan is joined by co-con­spir­a­tor and help­meet Allan Gins­berg in a Mass­a­chu­setts ceme­tery. They are nervi­ly stand­ing in front of Jack Kerouac’s grave­stone, and both expound on the sub­lime impor­tance the author’s work. This moment arrives after the pair have spent a lot of time togeth­er on tour, and one might assume that a sense of tour­bus cama­raderie would’ve devel­oped. Yet it’s a strange­ly awk­ward moment, in which both come across as ran­dom strangers per­form­ing for the cam­era, embroiled in a friend­ly game of intel­lec­tu­al one-upmanship.

You can inter­pret this scene as say­ing that Dylan saw lit­tle val­ue in human rela­tions out­side of the record­ing stu­dio, or off the stage. There’s no vin­dic­tive­ness there, it’s just very hard to detect the ker­nel of a deep­er friend­ship. Per­haps the pres­ence of the cam­era caus­es Dylan to retreat into his shell, ful­ly aware that these pri­vate thoughts will exist in the pub­lic domain, and will be open to sub­jec­tive inter­pre­ta­tion. It turns what, from the out­set, appears as a whim­si­cal aside to an exam­ple of artist pro­tect­ing his image – and his inde­pen­dence – from any fire dam­age. Or, it could all just be an impro­vised performance.

‘The Rolling Thun­der Revue’ arrived a year after Dylan had deliv­ered what many con­sid­er to be his mas­ter­piece, the dys­pep­tic divorce album ​‘Blood on the Tracks’ from 1975. The songs on his fol­low-up, ​‘Desire’, were more focused on churn­ing drum rhythms and a rugged sound that was point­ed­ly geared toward a live set­ting. He decid­ed to gath­er up a mot­ley crew of music indus­try com­rades and pack off on a mean­der­ing (and eye-water­ing­ly expen­sive) tour of medi­um-sized venues in towns and cities which were not used to play­ing host to rock royalty.

There’s a bit of social his­to­ry in the back­ground, par­tic­u­lar­ly the spread of anti-gov­ern­ment activism, yet Scors­ese doesn’t go too hard in try­ing to impose some high­er, epochal rel­e­vance to the tour, more inter­est­ed in allow­ing the inter-per­son­al dynam­ics of the var­i­ous play­ers to do the heavy lift­ing. To make mat­ters even more inter­est­ing, there is a new­ly filmed talk­ing head inter­view with one Mar­tin von Hasel­berg, an out­spo­ken cam­era man who claims to have been hired as the offi­cial tour filmographer.

Per the film, he was not well liked and seems to con­tra­dict much of what Dylan says. Is he real, or a fic­ti­tious ele­ment dis­creet­ly sewn into the fab­ric of the film as a way to enhance this notion of pro­tect­ing the sacred, unknow­able truth of this coun­ter­cul­ture be-in? It’s an intrigu­ing lit­tle touch, but does make what is already a very insider’s only affair feel even more tai­lored to those already in the know.

There’s a moment where hang­er-on Rolling Stone journo Lar­ry Slo­man is bitch­ing that his out­let wants more of the juicy facts than his flow­ery attempts to frame the tour as some kind of seis­mic event with­in the cul­tur­al land­scape. And to be frank, you do side with Rolling Stone a lit­tle, as the con­text for the tour, and how close it was to falling apart, is too often swept to the side­lines in favour of var­i­ous folks say­ing they had no idea at the time that the Revue would be seen in hind­sight as this big thing.

So there are some slip­pery manoeu­vres and some fudg­ing of the facts, but where this thing works like gang­busters is in the remas­tered con­cert footage. As with the Gins­berg ceme­tery encounter, there’s a sense that each artist on stage (and there are many) is furtive­ly scram­bling for per­son­al suprema­cy, but in this set­ting, it just makes the music feel that much more urgent and pas­sion­ate. Dylan him­self belts out every song as if singing them for the last time. He per­fect­ly wraps his tongue around every syl­la­ble, as though he were gift­ing the audi­ence his lyrics on a grand sil­ver plat­ter. His duets with Joan Baez, and their weird flir­ta­tious rela­tion­ship off-stage (which, again, may be a per­for­mance), are a major highlight.