Martin Scorsese’s ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ captures Dylan at the peak of his post-sixties inscrutability

He may regard Wildean concepts as philosophical lodestars, but Bob Dylan had the strongest bullshit detector in rock and roll. Based on the menagerie that crowded round him during the Rolling Thunder Revue, it’s a wonder he didn’t kick them in the teeth. Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the 1975 tour depicts counterculture standbys like Allen Ginsburg, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell as grown men and women who babble like eleventh graders, with Dylan as the scowling headmaster. “How was it?” he’s asked after a performance of “Isis.” “How was what?” is the response. Someone else refers to Ginsberg, a Method actor in his roly-poly guru phase, as the tour’s father figure. “He was anything but a father figure,” Dylan growls, after which Scorsese cuts to an explanation of the poet’s sexual appetite for straight thin young men (as if these dudes weren’t chasing every female teen they spotted!). After listening patiently to Mitchell explaining why she joined what she calls, with chemically imbalanced precision, “this experiment in communal existence,” Dylan snaps, “I think you better come on stage right now.” This from a man who wore a straw hat with plastic fruit and smeared what looked like whipped cream on his face.

What’s that line about even the pawns must hold a grudge? Over and over Dylan dismisses attempts to mythologize what he’s doing; only Dylan can out-Dylan Dylan. This fact gives Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese its interest. It needs reminding that 1974-1976 marked the peak of his American popularity: a reunion tour with The Band for which ten million people applied for tickets, three successive studio albums (Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, Desire) hitting #1 — a feat that eluded him in the sixties. He seemed on the verge, to quote Dylanologist Clinton Heylin, of re-occupying the cultural space he had abandoned in 1967. So why wouldn’t he lead a handsomely paid pickup band on a tour through mid-level venues and, oh, film the results? Part retrospective accounting, in part a wade through scraps of the notorious Renaldo and Clara, Rolling Thunder Revue avoids coherence much as its subject does sentimentality. When a loose and charming Sharon Stone explains how as a teenager meeting Dylan she tried impressing him with her knowledge of Kabuki, it doesn’t take a calculator to figure out that she was too young to have been involved. But if she wasn’t, she should have been. And why not? Dylan doth make mythlogizers of us all.

And Scorsese gets it, unlike many journalists and artists who want to sit on a shadow. Let Rolling Stone scribe Larry Sloman offer commedia dell’arte as an influence on the face paint and wobbly line between character and person; twenty-first-century Dylan wants you to know it was all KISS, man, whose Gene Simmons he met thanks to the efforts of mysteriously indefatigable violinist Scarlet Rivera. And what does Scorsese do? Why, juxtapose live clips of “Rock N Roll All Nite” and Marcel Carné’s classic Children of Paradise? I wonder if this intentional blurring of so-called high and low art offends Dylanistas (I’m sure it delighted Sharon Stone) who still have the mistaken impression that their idol doesn’t revel in being a pisser. Meeting Patti Smith at one of her early club appearances in Greenwich Village’s Gerde’s Folk City, he bats not an eyelash as she holds forth on French poet Arthur RAN-BO as if she just signed him to a multi-album deal, but it’s clear he admires Smith as a fellow shamanistic poseur, as well he might after enduring Smith’s earnest spoken word twaddle about crystal balls in baseball diamonds.

Watching Rolling Thunder Revue, it’s hard distinguishing the musical performances from the backstage. The band plays characters onstage and off that reflect the blowzy, winding valentines to gangsters, goddesses, being white tourists in an African country, and ex-wives taking up space on Desire, the failed album he would release in January 1976; they’re gypsies with tour riders coming to town (the film predicts what Prince intended for Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge). Given the spacious arrangements, the music, old and new, runs from terrific to too much. Bassist/musical director Rob Stoner and drummer Howard Wyeth comprised a rhythm section of weight and suppleness. Mick Ronson, late of the Spiders from Mars, plays terse rockabilly leads quite different from Robbie Robertson’s pinprick accompaniment (Ronson also knows something about performing with painted, protean weirdos). I mentioned “Isis,” sung with precision and fury. Experienced after an aged, magnificent Rubin Carter describes what it meant for his legal woes to have Bob Dylan’s unconditioned support, “Hurricane” shakes off almost forty years of awkward sanctimony, not to mention its undeserved pairing with, say, Desire‘s paean to Joey Gallo; in Dylan’s intense reading, Hurricane ceases to be a rebel whom rich white musicians should revere. On the other hand, Dylan shouts “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” like an auctioneer in front of farm equipment. He fell in love with this hectoring delivery, and by 1979 and 1980 was writing songs to match.

Convivial but not sold on the boys-will-be-boys revelry, Rolling Thunder Revue has the good sense to interview a Joan Baez, whose poise and rectitude have often made her an object of derision among Dylan fans (Scorsese includes a clip of Baez boogieing on stage; she might be a church organist after her third glass of wine). Indeed, she still bemuses Dylan — he calls her a person who stepped off a meteorite or some such thing. But she got what he was after: wearing Dylan’s makeup and clothes in a delicious gender inversion exercise fools everyone in the band; too bad Dylan didn’t do the Christian thing and dress as Baez. Even better is Mitchell, who joined the Revue at her own expense, an episode in her life that reportedly inspired “Coyote,” performed here backstage on acoustic with Dylan strumming along. The song is so powerful, so perceptive, so complete that it’s a wonder no one fucked it up recording it in the studio months later.

The presentation of Ginsberg has its problems. A generational holdover still hep to the winds of change, he refused to go the Robert Lowell route and just grow ugly mutton chops. Dylan and the talking heads, while genuinely liking him, discuss him as if he were a homo court jester, a newly anointed swami (the film includes one of Renaldo and Clara‘s most unintentionally hilarious scenes: the Dylan-Ginsberg visit to Jack Kerouac’s grave). Dylan even goes so far as to praise his dancing, which on the evidence is as uninhibited as Baez’s but looser and more rhythmic; he’s up for anything. Yet don’t see Stoner, Ronson, or Dylan dancing; that’s for women and gays. Too many stories about the sixties depend on the recollections and framing of straight men.

But these ambiguities add weight to our thinking about the period, for which we should be grateful to Rolling Thunder Revue. For Dylanists fascinated by their deity’s there/not there essence — a noun I use advisedly — it joins Todd Haynes’ 2007 effort and the too little screened Masked and Anonymous (2003). The man himself can’t stop playing a game he’s mastered. The last word: “What remains of that tour? Nothing. Not one single thing. Ashes.”

GRADE:  B+