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"A plain picture," the brat-genius in show business. Bob Dylan evinces numerous personae over the course of the documentary, for the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" prelude he's Buster Keaton in a back alley with scrawled cards, a proto-MTV joke blessed by Allen Ginsberg himself. The last acoustic tour, three weeks of hotel rooms and press conferences and concert halls in England under D.A. Pennebaker's cinéma-vérité scrutiny. "London Bridge is Falling Down" right out of the airport gate, a gaggle of reporters try to pin down the jet-lagged hipster in the first of several skirmishes. "What is your real message?" "My real message?" Young fans wait outside the window, the audience roars as a defective microphone is fixed and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" kicks into gear. Negotiating tactics with Albert Grossman, posing tips from Joan Baez, Alan Price and his beer bottle-opening piano. A Mississippi flashback ("Only a Pawn in Their Game"), the imagistic storytelling of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a voice as good as Caruso's "if you listen carefully." ("Not so much singing as sermonizing," declares one journo, another is tasked with justifying his existence while the interviewee strums his guitar.) If Warhol encourages the theatricality of his stars, Pennebaker accentuates their offhand (and off-guard) mundanities. Not yet 25, the artist is puckish and petty, freewheeling and inscrutable, self-infatuated and self-mocking—he passes before the grainy lenses as a blur of sunglasses and cigarettes and attitude. "Dylan Digs Donovan," the encounter turns out to be a passive-aggressive showdown, "To Sing for You" answered with "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." The prick-poet is spotted from above in a pool of stage lighting and last glimpsed drifting in the back of a taxi, so it goes with "suckcess" on the road (cf. Zappa's 200 Motels). "Do you ask The Beatles that?!" In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |