Bob Dylan PBS movie packs a wallop

Not afraid to change
By 1961, the lad rechristened Bob Dylan (“the name just popped into my head one day,” he insists) had come to New York to sing songs and find his home in an age of social ferment. The times, they were a-changin’, and Dylan was changing too.

And he kept on changing. Within a few years, Dylan and his band were getting booed at every date on a European tour.

“What happened to Woody Guthrie, Bob?” shouts one of many hecklers at the “new” Bob Dylan.

“I’m gonna get a new Bob Dylan,” Dylan cracks later, backstage, “and use him: ‘Here’s the new Bob Dylan. See how long HE lasts.”’

On July 29, 1966, shortly after gratefully returning home from that stormy tour, he was nearly killed in a motorcycle crash, and spent months recuperating. It marked the end of an era, and there the film ends.

Of course, Dylan, now 64, has continued to write, perform and record. But the temptation in this film is to speak of him in the past tense. Even he seems to do it.

“He’s continued to evolve,” Scorsese says. “But he’s a creature of those times.” Distant times, when he created songs still blowing in the wind. By the harshest measure, it’s been decades since Bob Dylan “mattered.” That’s OK. Luminously, “No Direction Home” makes clear how much.

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