No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

"No Direction Home" is so thoroughly captivating, with so much rare and new material - fresh interviews, as well as vintage film and TV footage - that it's frustrating that the focus is so narrow. [26 Sep 2005, p.87]

It runs 3 hours and 37 minutes. It's too darned short. [26 Sep 2005, p.C7]

Extraordinary ... Scorsese uses Dylan himself as the narrator of the film, which follows about six years of his career. From the stunning opening sequence of Dylan braying "Like a Rolling Stone" at a 1966 British concert, "No Direction Home" brings it all back home, showing this remarkable young man, wise and cunning beyond his years, impish, impudent, frequently high and impossibly brilliant. [26 Sep 2005, p.C1]

[An] utterly brilliant documentary. [25 Sep 2005, p.1E]

No Direction Home is not just another two nights in front of the tube. Even by the standards of PBS' American Masters -- the medium's finest biography series ever -- Scorsese's film is 3 1/2 hours of breathing air so rarefied compared to most television that it feels as if one is inhaling helium. [26 Sep 2005, p.1C]

Scorsese's [film] ... creates a portrait that is deep, sympathetic, perceptive and yet finally leaves Dylan shrouded in mystery, which is where he properly lives.

The result is a testament to Scorsese's considerable story-telling skills. With no narration at all, No Direction Home is an intricate yet seamless account of an elusive subject whose own friends call him a shape-shifter. [26 Sep 2005, p.E3]

This part of Dylan's story is, of course, well known. In understated style Scorsese makes it fresh, unearthing a wealth of rare performance footage of the impossibly young and magnetic singer and mixing it with incisive talking head interviews. [26 Sep 2005, p.41]

Scorsese has created a document that will satiate Dylan fans over repeated viewings and should bring naysayers into the Dylan fold. The revelatory 3½-hour docu is a triumph.

"No Direction Home" isn't moviemaking, it's mythmaking -- albeit of the highest order. It lacks the hurly-burly immediacy of D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 portrait of Dylan on the road, "Dont Look Back," or the Maysles brothers' documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 tour, "Gimme Shelter." Instead, it settles for the easy conclusions that Dylan once routinely punctured. That said, it's still a fascinating valentine from one artist to another, the most detailed look yet at Dylan's transformation from acoustic folk singer to shades-wearing rocker. [25 Sep 2005, p.C9]

A fabulous, fawning biography by Martin Scorsese ... It's a stunningly beautiful, powerful presentation of Bob Dylan as the one, true American Idol. [26 Sep 2005, p.R2]

The achievement of "No Direction Home" is that it humanizes the enigma without demystifying the artist, and it gives us a person to care about. [25 Sep 2005, p.E1]

A lively, absorbing, often deeply moving account ... The result isn't a comprehensive compendium of factoids or deep dish -- there's precious little personal information related in the 207-minute running time -- but instead a tightly focused portrait of a young artist searching for his musical and professional identity and whose search happened to bring him to the very center of the American political and cultural zeitgeist. [26 Sep 2005, p.C1]

While "No Direction Home" can't turn the American Mastery trick of telling us what makes a cultural titan tick, it probably gets deeper inside the Dylan mystery than any such portrait is likely to. [26 Sep 2005, p.B17]

The resulting Scorsese film is just like its subject: often frustrating but always compelling. [25 Sep 2005, p.F1]

Even though Scorsese does his share of sepia scanning, we are not, thank God, in PBS purgatory, with a portentous narrator telling you what to think. ... To narrate selected details from this journey from the Iron Range to Greenwich Village to Rock Star Babylon, we get generous, attention-span respecting clips of Dylan performances and reminiscences from carefully selected talking heads.

If No Direction Home is less a concert film and more of an American Masters documentary than The Last Waltz was, it is so much longer (by about an hour and a half) that we end up with the same amount of music anyway, and most of this music hasn’t been nibbled to death by cretinous videoheads who think that what they have to say is more interesting than the music they say it about.

"No Direction Home" offers little that is new and much that is already grindingly familiar to fans of His Bobness. And yet it is tremendously watchable and occasionally rewarding, even if it's apt to leave most viewers with the feeling that they have been served appetizers and dessert without getting so much as a glimpse of the main course.