If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This biography of Bob Dylan traces his life from leaving his home in Hibbing, Minnesota until his motorcycle accident in 1966 at the age of 25. I came away from this with a renewed appreciation for just what a phenomenon he is. I can't think of any other artist who has given us what he has. There are other folk singers and rock stars, but nothing like Dylan. If you think of a poet as someone who strings words together to produce powerful images and strong emotional reactions, then Dylan is your man. I admit that a lot of Dylan's songs don't make complete sense to me, but they fascinate and afford many interpretations, and just the flow of words is captivating. The first scene in Part 2 provides a great insight. Dylan is seen on the street reading two signs, one saying, "Animals & Birds bought or sold on commission," and the other, "We will collect clip bath & return your dog/ KN1 7727/ Cigarettes and Tobacco." Dylan takes these words and goes on a spontaneous riff for a minute making sentences from them. Clearly he is a man who delights in words and has a great facility with them. You can see from this clip how he can come up with his songs. Could anyone but a poet come up with lines like: "The morning breeze like a bugle blew/ Against the drums of dawn," and "The ocean wild like an organ played/ The seaweed's wove its strands." The film traces the roots of Dylan's early musical interests; it would have been interesting to see how early on he became facile with words.It is amazing how many inane questions Dylan was asked by a largely ignorant press. Questions like, "Why do you sing?" and "How do you explain your popularity?" It's no wonder he could get frustrated and annoyed. Clips from a current interview are interspersed throughout the film, so Scorcese was able to get more meaningful comments out of him than any of the questioners shown here.As any good artist Dylan keeps changing. When he went from acoustic guitar to electric with a backup band many people felt somehow betrayed, but he was just moving on. The variety of his output is quite amazing, from poignant songs like, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune," to biting social commentary like "Only a Pawn in the Game," to wistful love songs like "Girl From the North Country," and then all the classics that were the soundtrack for a generation. This film seems to imply that Dylan's career ended with his motorcycle accident, but far from it--he has continued to write and record, having released a new album as recently as 2006.Another topic of interest covered is the artist/businessman relationship. Most artists want to reach as large an audience that can appreciate them and this usually means that there must be agents, promoters, and investors in the picture. Dylan seems to have navigated this precarious situation successfully while still preserving his integrity. He was not above embellishing his background and you have to feel that he has to have some business sense to have wound up where he is. But he appears to come from that breed of artist whose main goal is to practice his craft rather than achieve fame.I found parts of the film not completely successful. The interviews with some lesser knowns as Paul Nelson and John Cohen were of questionable value to me--it was not clear just what role they played in Dylan's career. The interviews with Alan Ginsberg are interesting, but his importance might not be understood by one not of his generation. It was frustrating to have songs interrupted or cut short, but I suppose that was necessary in the interests of keeping this under four hours.Of course the archival footage of, and current interview with, Joan Baez are highlights. I had forgotten just what a pure voice she had, a voice that seemed almost too perfect to be of this world. There is some great archival footage of Johnny Cash, a great performance by Odetta, and fascinating clips of John Jacob Niles, Peter LaFarge, and the Clancy Brothers. Put Dylan's poetry to music together with his musical talent and distinctive voice and you have a complete package. Of course not everyone appreciates that package, but as Joan Baez said, "If you're interested, he goes way, way deep."This is an ambitious biography of a complex man and even at almost four hours one feels that much has been left off the table. The work of any artist must remain a mystery.

Bob Dylan is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of music and this is a great paradox, as he is also one of the most filmed if not the most filmed performer of the recent decades. Martin Scorsese's three hours plus documentary could not have been possible without extensive filming of events like the Newport festival of jazz in 1963 or the earlier documentary film of D.A. Pennebaker on his 1966 tour in Great Britain. We can see in this film several versions of some of his famous songs like 'Hard Rain' or 'Blowing in the Wind'. And yet, despite all this filmed material Dylan intentionally or not keeps an aura of secrecy around his person. Even the interviews seem more destined to build his image than to explain.Explaining a great artist like Dylan is futile, and Scorsese knows it. He does however help is immensely to understand, feel and love the artist, by bringing alive a lot of sounds and images of the music played in the formative years of Dylan. He takes us by hand and immerses us in the American music and arts scene of the beginning of the 60s. His interviews with people who lived the birth and development of this great talent, and the later interviews with Dylan himself fill in the shining and deep puzzle of this complex individual and creator. His evolution from simple and sensible folks to complex rock and his refusal to enroll in politics by selecting the option to speak his mind only through the language of art become life on screen. The pieces of music we hear are better in the timed recordings than in studio versions. The way the film is made it feels never too long, it never bores, on the contrary it takes us in the universe of one of the greatest artists of our time - and we should be thankful to one of the greatest film-makers of our time for having made this film.

People ask, but why did they boo when Bob Dylan started playing electric guitar? Surely it wasn't THAT big a deal??I was alive then. Believe me, it was. People got VERY upset about it. I think it was something to do with investing so heavily, in an emotional way, with his folk persona. He symbolised every teenager's dream of righteous rebellion. Audiences were far less fragmented in those days. People staked a lot on believing in him (or rather, believing what they wanted his lyrics to mean). You could cut the air with a knife when you asked someone, "if they liked his electric stuff".Bob Dylan reached the height of his fame after three or four albums of (largely) protest songs. He accompanied himself on nothing more than an acoustic guitar and harmonica. Some were simple stories. Some were deep reflections on man's inhumanity to man. He's had no singing training and his voice was rough. But his lyrics captured the imagination of a generation. It was the time of mass protests against the Vietnam war. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Boys wearing their hair long was an act of defiance. Revulsion against the values of their fathers, against a world 'gone wrong'. When I took a Bob Dylan record home, my father told me, "Get that music out of this house!"The only problem from Dylan's point of view was, he wasn't into being a figurehead for the antiwar movement or anything else. He just wanted to write his poetry. And sing. It's all he did. Many organisations were already on knife-edge over his refusal to 'lead the parade'. Dylan just kept on writing. Albums went platinum. And Dylan kept on writing.One day he put some of the new poems to music with electric guitars and a backing band. In retrospect, they are easily seen as the same kinda stuff. More sophisticated maybe, but still protestin'. Yet his fans didn't see it like that. The wandering minstrel image was gone. He looked not like a humble folk artist but like a rock star. It all aroused incredible animosity, especially when the technical limitations of some of the sound sets meant people couldn't hear the lyrics properly.Dylan didn't believe in pandering to his audience, although at one point he observes that he can't get in tune if they're booing. There is a concert where they boo continuously (Why did they buy tickets? he wonders . . . But with no thought of going backwards). The only break in the crowd's response is when he plays a song they recognise cos it happens to be near the top of the charts.These were kids that really listened to his lyrics. He could fill the Albert Hall and well-behaved, thoughtful teenagers had sat in rapt attention as he intoned Masters of War or Blowin' in the Wind. They wanted his poetry. But more than that, they wanted a hero. When he 'went electric', the volume seemed to crash through the genteel folk stage like a blasphemous typhoon wind. No Direction home is no idealised portrait of Dylan. Meandering through several hours of archive footage, interviews and concerts, Scorsese presents him not as a hero but as a man. The sound quality on some of the electric sets really is abominable. The pre-fame Dylan is accused of stealing some rare records and of telling lies if it was necessary to get on. But this seemingly rambling biopic eventually drives home a point that baffled his audiences at the time: Dylan, in all his guises, just wrote poetry. If people used it for anything else that was up to them.No Direction Home is not the gripping viewing you might expect for a portrait of one of the most famous recording artists of all time. But it gets to the heart of the man in a way that even Dylan's own (much later) autobiography hardly got to. For those who have read the biography, those early years are beautifully sketched out in the film. Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, even Woody Guthrie. Talking heads include Joan Baez giving her recollections, and the old man himself, looking back on his early rise to fame with an openness that few have witnessed before. It is a very different film from Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. A more complex portrait than the earlier film set out to achieve, No Direction Home is Bob Dylan deconstructed.One day someone will make a fictionalised movie of Bob Dylan. And Scorsese's documentary film will be a major historical resource.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) **** (out of 4) Being a die-hard Dylan and Scorsese fan meant I was really looking forward to this documentary and for sometime I was a bit worried that hype would kill the thing for me but it clearly didn't. Dylan's story is something that anyone could eat up and Scorsese pulls out all the stops in somewhat trying to explain Dylan. While Dylan doesn't pour his soul out here I think Scorsese, with his great talent of using music, helps make it clear all the stuff that was going through Dylan at the time as well as what was going through the country. The way Scorsese used "A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall" and connection it to the JFK assassination is quite remarkable and even non-fans could feel the power of the song and it's lyrics. Scorsese does a brilliant job of telling the story and the majority of the documentary takes a look at Dylan's early days. Then, kinda like the downfall of Henry Hill in Goodfellas, Scorsese cuts to the final scenes and uses fast editing to show how quickly Dylan tired down. The infamous European tour of 1966 has had hundreds of books written about it and it's fascinating that Scorsese doesn't use any narration but instead just uses news clips and old interviews to tell the story. We can just look at Dylan and see that the end is nearing.Scorsese has easily created one of the greatest documentaries out there that might appeal to non-Dylan fans more than the die hards. When people ask me who Dylan is and what he did I never really know where to start but this documentary is a good place to show how he changed music while trying to change the country. As a die-hard fan the documentary also gives all sorts of never before released concert footage, which is a huge bonus. The infamous "Judas"/"Play It F*cking Loud" footage is like a holy grail to Dylan fans and it's here complete. There's plenty of other music of the times with Joan Baez and Johnny Cash as well. Scorsese really nailed down the Dylan aspect but it's also nice seeing him capture the mood of the Civil Rights and other issues that were all going on at the same time. To music buffs and Dylan fans this is a very important document but it's also very important to American history.