DN:FILM The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
A shout-out here to Martin Scorsese’s much-heralded latest, THE ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY, for its serving as a terrific example of what a film can do in 2019—the more so since much of the actual film we see is from three and a half decades earlier.
Rolling Thunder, the director's latest entry in his collection of muscular docs about the titans of old school rock and roll—he’s covered the Rolling Stones, Dylan, The Band, George Harrison—returned to Dylan with the result that he and his subject/partner craft a hall-of-mirrors reflection on the United States in the mid-1970s; and a recollection of the birth of the modern caravan carnival music tour and a period of intense, fiercely dedicated creation and performance from Dylan and a rogues gallery of characters so broad and encompassing that they strain credulity: Here’s Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Sam Shepard and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell and Allen Ginsburg (with and without his beard; it’s very Samson) Roger McGuinn and Mick Ronson and Sharon Stone and Ronee Blakley, who had appeared, also in 1975, as a fictional country music superstar in Robert Altman’s masterful ’Nashville;’ as well as the legendary filmmaker Stefan Von Dorp and congressman Jack Tanner.
The quasi-doc excavates content from 1975 that was first used in the legendarily panned feature "Renaldo and Clara," which Dylan directed with scene-writing assists from the late, great Shepard, who appears in this one as a fictionalized version of himself—insofar as he claims to have had a different role in the 1975 Dylan & friends tour than he actually did--offering his thoughts now in factually bogus but (arguably) philosophically accurate contemporary interviews
So to return to that strained credulity: It’s actually broken, as several of those characters don’t in fact exist. Scorsese has tried to recreate—or, to use a word that appears as part of one of the official, longer titles of the film—“conjure” the chaotic, creative fever of the real 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue by mixing and matching footage shot at the time (much of which was shot because of the Renaldo and Clara project) with new interviews with the folks from the tour, plus interviews with folks who weren’t on the tour but are now pretending they were. They talk about influences that did or didn’t actually occur, such as Dylan’s adopting the use of white kabuki face paint for his stage makeup because of KISS. It’s Christopher Guest techniques and technical trickery brought into the service of Nobel Prize win, who says at one point in the film that one thing the tour it’s about should have had is more masks, because if someone is wearing a mask, that’s when he’ll tell the truth. The Rolling Thunder Revue’s masking/revealing/recreation of truth come with an invigorating invitation to chase it.
The result: Scorsese and prankster Dylan pull off a terrific stunt for the age of streaming docs, a great trick of a movie that begs to be watched on Netflix with continual access to Wiki sites so the viewer can annotate everything David Foster Wallace style: all the truths, interconnections, overlaps, blarney and falsehoods that inform the picture double back on each other again and again. And, if you had the good fortune to catch Rolling Thunder while it was still in theaters, you could still head off the the arthouse multiplex and catch it in on big-screen surround-sound glory.
Streaming on Netflix