On demand: "Rolling Thunder Revue"

Martin Scorsese has already given us the straight skinny on Bob Dylan, via his 2005 doc No Direction Home, commissioned for PBS's straitlaced American Masters strand. With Rolling Thunder Revue - made for Netflix, and larking around under the alternative titles Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue and Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, as if it were part of the Star Wars universe - we find Scorsese having some late-period fun printing what amounts to Dylan legend. The film's subject is the tour Dylan initiated in 1976 to mark America's bicentennial, which took countercultural scraps and tatters (Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Allen Ginsberg, the latter looking more than ever like David Cross's Tobias from Arrested Development) and arranged them into a rotating jugband dispatched to significant sites in US history. Trouble is, the tour wasn't a commercial success by a long chalk, and nobody - not least Dylan himself - really remembers it. We're lucky, in that someone among the hangers-on thought to turn on a camera to capture some mementoes as the project came together and set out on the road. Rolling Thunder Revue frames this footage with a clip from Méliès' 1896 silent The Vanishing Lady, capturing a stage magician mid-act, and the expectation is that Scorsese in 2019 will be doing much the same as Dylan was in 1976, i.e. conjuring something out of nothing very much. Woodstock and The Last Waltz were definitive pop docs; Rolling Thunder Revue, by contrast, presents as a funny, irreverent afterthought, a taproom reminiscence backed up by footage and access other documentarists would kill for. The really funny thing is how, like Dylan and his merry band of players, this musical shaggy-dog story does finally go somewhere, and transports us along with it.

Incongruous as it may seem, that Méliès clip is also priming us for the theatricality of the Dylan live experience as it was circa 1976. In concert, the singer can be seen rocking his familiar littlest-hobo look, but with his face under a mask or painted white, possibly as a result of exposure to commedia dell'arte, Bowie-as-Ziggy or (and this is not so outlandish, given that his fiddle player Scarlet Rivera was dating their lead singer) the then-sensational KISS; either way, this Dylan seems to have realised he can properly put on a show, in a way the muso who mumbled his way through the best part of the 1960s felt no inclination to. As a lifelong Dylan sceptic - someone who willingly acknowledges the singer's place in the history books, while generally approaching his music with the exact same enthusiasm I retain for history books - I found something stirring in the sight of Dylan loosening up, being freed from the understandably onerous responsibility of being The Voice of America™ and instead repositioning himself, among fellow travellers, as a voice of America. This Dylan is a more pivotal and flexible figure than the entrenched and embattled outsider who first shuffled onto the stage; the doc helped me realise that his laughably infamous switch to electric a decade before the events of Rolling Thunder should never have been framed as a betrayal or break so much as natural evolution, a musical analogue to those progressive values he framed in song. (As to the matter of how pivotal Dylan was in 1976: listen to his rendition of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" here, and tell me there's not a preview of the incoming Strummer in his vocals. In the Kevin Bacon game of pop, Dylan gets you from folk to rock, and from rock to punk, in one move.)

Rolling Thunder Revue is the first Dylan movie to persuade me that the singer was possessed of a sense of humour (dude recorded "Must Be Santa": how could I ever have thought otherwise?), and his period mischief-making looks to have guided Scorsese's efforts in the present. (You sense this must have been a fun sidehustle while the VFX wonks were working out how to de-age De Niro.) One gag is that the sincere reminiscences of illustrious talking heads (tour survivors, plus such interested onlookers as Sam Shepard and Sharon Stone, who apparently attended several of these gigs as a fan) are dotted with contributions from hangers-on you'll likely never have heard of, in part because they are to some degree fictional creations, stand-ins for those who were there. Even Dylan himself - the great truthteller of his generation - looks to be reading off a script at points; the times really are a-changin'. Docu-purists may let rip with anguished cries of "fake news!" - but this too goes to the bigger picture of people putting on a show: the fictional interjections are Scorsese's way of getting at a broader truth about this moment, a scene, and why this music continues to mean so much to his generation. For one thing, all the mask-wearing and mythmaking serves to set the genuine flickers of vérité into sharp relief: take, for example, the shot of a young woman taking a moment to compose herself at the end of one gig before breaking down in tears, her soul having been touched in some indefinable yet profound way. That, at least, is unfakeable, and it makes you wonder: where that now sixtysomething woman is today, whether she still remembers this gig, and whether she'd be a more reliable witness than many of those Scorsese has gathered here.

The hybrid form also seems to gesture towards the confusion of America at the time the movie documents, emerging as it was from the trials of Vietnam, Nixon and - if you were Scorsese - Scarface-scaled blizzards of premium-grade cocaine. The Bicentennial looms large over Rolling Thunder Revue: it's the very first element Scorsese troubles to establish, via archive of a Times Square hustler belting out his own unique interpretation of the national anthem, and over the course of the film it comes to represent a mass figuring-out of what America stood for. The Revue, it transpires, was named after a native American chieftain; it found Dylan finally looking back (literally reviewing) his country's recent and distant history, and attempting to determine, in his role as spokesperson for the youth of America, what of it should be carried forward into a more inclusive, egalitarian future. (It may not have been the success anybody wanted, which may explain Dylan's diffidence in recollecting it, but its goals appear as noble as anything proposed in the Sixties.) That's why Scorsese ends the movie with Ginsberg's to-camera plea to onlookers to make their own art, and thus their own eternities; that's why the closing credits contain a comprehensive list of Dylan's tour dates over the following four decades, suggesting he's been on the road - extending and refining this questing project - ever since. It may also in the end explain why Scorsese came back to this footage, to this particular chapter of this particular life, in such a year as 2019. Whatever you call it, Rolling Thunder Revue is a film that knows the consolations one might take from the sight and sound of unbridled artistic freedom; its wisdoms are larkily dispensed, true, but it understands that music helps us traverse fraught moments, and that songs often elude and outlast tyrants.

Rolling Thunder Revue is currently streaming on Netflix.