He'll be your mirror

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan is ready and rarin' to look back.

By Kimberly Chun

'WHEN YOU FIND the tone, there's more dimensions, like Cubism." According to Marianne Faithfull in her delightfully trashy and erudite 1994 autobio, Faithfull, Bob Dylan came on to her just that way in April 1965, during the singer-songwriter's stay at the Savoy Hotel in London. Footage of those days shows up in D.A. Pennebaker's sublime 1967 documentary, Don't Look Back, and Martin Scorsese's new "picture," No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, which has been released on DVD this week and airs on PBS beginning Sept. 26. Faithfull had slipped into the singer-songwriter's compound, along with the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg, and, she writes, "within a matter of days I had been elevated to Chief Prospective Consort," while Dylan's "soon-to-be-wife, Sara Loundes, was off in Europe somewhere." Doing a little dance of seduction, he types out some lyrics for Faithfull before she turns into a petrified pillar of salt and rebuffs him, declaring she's pregnant and to wed in a week.

"Without a warning he turned into Rumpelstiltskin. He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.

" 'Are you satisfied now?' he asked. I was witnessing a little tantrum of genius."

Even in the thick of a perceived cold shoulder, Dylan always seemed to set the course, that of primarily cerebral seduction, although being told this, again and again – since all roads, directions, writers, and directors home in on Dylan's brilliance – has begun to take on the semblance of ritual in the past few years. The fascination hinges partly in the Rashomon-like perspectives inspired by the singer-songwriter, who'll be embodied by actors as disparate as Colin Farrell and Cate Blanchett in the forthcoming Todd Haynes movie. In this instance, Pennebaker's offhand take on the Savoy scene, which is appropriated by Scorsese, ignores Faithfull (barely a footnote in the Dylan story) and instead focuses on the artist's carelessness toward Joan Baez, his ex and ex-singing partner, who is also hanging in the hotel room tellingly warbling his "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word," and pointedly not invited to play onstage. It's a snapshot of power – sexual, creative, and as Ginsberg says in No Direction Home, spiritual – which Dylan now downplays with the disingenuous but gracious crack, "You can't be wise and in love at the same time."

But a certain sector of brainy rock fans have never quite stopped being in love with Dylan and looking to him for wisdom, though we'll likely never be in the clutch of a high-low, three-TV-channel monoculture quite like the one that served Elvis, the Beatles, and Dylan. "Bob Dylan is the last sacred cow," a female music writer once told me, and in many ways, she's right: After so many '60s icons' splashy breakups and cash-in reunion tours and subpar solo (or not) albums, Dylan appears to be one of the last classic-rock idols left standing – one who still inspires reams of analysis and volumes of prose, from the songwriter's own insinuating, rambling memoir, Chronicles, Vol. 1 to Greil Marcus' recent Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads to No Direction Home's accompanying The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 (Simon and Schuster) and the doc's lovely soundtrack, The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 (Legacy). The swarm of interest surrounding Dylan, as a certainty now willing to look back and complex enough to examine through all manner of prisms (some, like ex-Spin editor Alan Licht at the recent CMJ Music Marathon in NYC, praise Dylan as an artist who burst open the explosive potential of wordplay in rock and rap, whereas others view him as the link between America's intelligensia/political left and the pop/mainstream says something about a music industry searching for ground in a year of downward-arcing CD sales).

Read the title of the compelling No Direction Home as a tribute to the "Like a Rolling Stone" lyric as well as an aesthetic goal for Scorsese, who shows his hand at the start of the film, then disappears into the pull of Dylan's '61-'66 trajectory. No Direction Home's backbone is built on the vivid, invaluable footage of the 24-year-old Dylan in 1966 London, looking like a tweedy Omar Rodriguez with his high-voltage 'fro, playing an electric set with an equally baby-faced Hawks (otherwise known as the Band) as they collectively put "their heads in the lion's mouth," in Dylan's words, playing in front of an American flag for cheering and booing English fans. "What happened to Woody Guthrie, Bob?" one disgruntled yob yells. "These are all protest songs – now c'mon," Dylan gently chastises the audience, before adding, "It's not British music. It's American music – now c'mon."

In a typically bold stroke, Scorsese jump-cuts from the riveting live electric set – almost as affecting as the Band's in the director's Last Waltz – to completely snowed-out shots of Dylan's Hibbing, Minn., home, the blank white slate from which he emerged. Scorsese uses old photos of the adolescent Robert Zimmerman, silent Super-8 images of his small-town America, and the sounds of influences like Hank Williams and Webb Pierce to construct a groundwork for the music to come and to lay to rest Dylan's later self-mythologizing.

The filmmaker's subdued but trademark gestures – panning across lines of lyrics as if the words were characters – take the backseat as Dylan's artistic journey as a self-described "musical expeditionary" picks up momentum. Dylan's present-day interviews fare bette r than those the director muffed with the Band in The Last Waltz, and Scorsese augments those by borrowing extensively from Don't Look Back and Murray Lerner's film Festival (which covered the 1963, '64, and '65 Newport Folk Festivals), but the most riveting portions of No Direction Home concern little- or never-seen footage: Dylan on TV in '63 singing a beautiful version of "Man of Constant Sorrow"; fielding inane questions at an SF press conference; sparring with alternately worshipful and confrontational fans; and backstage joking about planting boo-ers during his acoustic set.

No Direction Home will undoubtedly be must-see TV for fans, and an education – a 207-minute one that should offer AP credit – for newbs, while providing cultural context to satisfy historians and the sights and sounds of the many faces and places that touched Dylan's music (with the glaring omission of immediate family like ex-wife Sara).

Using the songwriter as a mirror, as Pennebaker and Faithfull do, Scorsese refracts as a true storyteller, gravitating toward the conflict of Dylan's initial, plugged-in provocations and himself rereading Dylan's outrageous, jabbing, jesting 1963 acceptance speech for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee's Tom Paine award, chafing against the "topical songwriter" label. Ever the yarn-spinner, Scorsese saves the best for last, as Dylan counters the "Judas" heckler in London with "You're a liar" and then turns to the Band of all bands, commanding, "Play it fucking loud." Ending on that note of resistance, the filmmaker fits Dylan among his favored antiheroes – Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta – who go through a looking glass of pop so darkly. This went so quickly, darting so rapidly ahead of his generation, that a motorcycle crash almost seems fated.

'No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,' part one, airs on KQED, Channel 9, Mon/26, 9 p.m.; Sept. 28, 3 a.m. Part two airs Tues/27, 9 p.m.; Sept. 29, 3 a.m. For other dates and more information, go to www.kqed.org or www.pbs.org.