It is tempting to consider Martin Scorsese’s new Dylan documentary, the Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story as a sequel to his 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, on Dylan’s early life and career.Footnote ¹ Whereas No Direction Home ends with Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966, the Rolling Thunder Revue picks up the story just as Dylan begins touring again following the accident. For Dylan fans, the Revue tour of 1975–1976 marks a seminal moment in the artist’s career—his return to peak form after the crash. The two films, however, could not be more dissimilar. Indeed, the film stands apart from other Dylan documentaries in its highly reflexive style and form, more akin to the unconventional biopic I’m Not There (2007) or Dylan’s famously inventive memoir, Chronicles, than No Direction Home or the classic 1967 Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back. The Rolling Thunder Revue is as much a metacommentary on popular music fandom and memory as it is an effort to tell the story of the tour through film. The film also offers important insight into Dylan’s complicated legacy as a singer-songwriter working loosely within the Anglo-American folk music tradition.

Dylan had only just returned to touring in 1974 after an eight-year hiatus when he launched the Revue tour in the fall of 1975. The tour was loosely conceived to be in the mould of an old-timey revue, a travelling circus act of sorts, that would travel to small towns across the United States, often playing small, intimate venues—a turn away from the mega-arena concerts of the 1974 tour, which Dylan reportedly found to be an alienating experience. A slew of artists joined the tour at some point or another, including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ronnie Hawkins, and Bob Neuwirt, as well as the writers Allen Ginsburg and Sam Shepard. The first leg of the tour travelled the Northeast and Canada in the fall of 1975, while the second took place in the spring of 1976 across the South and parts of the Southwest. In the years since, there has been much written about the Revue tour, including several books, as well as countless hours of footage and audio recordings, which have largely circulated bootleg among Dylan fans, although Columbia released a 14-CD box set of recordings from the tour to coincide with the film’s release. For diehard fans, the tour presents an endless trove of music, footage, and stories to revisit over and over.

The film mostly revolves around footage from the 1978 film, Renaldo and Clara, which was shot largely during the first leg of the tour in the fall of 1975. The documentary intersplices grainy footage from the tour with interviews of the participants reflecting on their experiences, including interviews with Dylan himself. But the film also includes staged interviews too, performed by actors like Sharon Stone and Michael Murphy (playing the fictional congressman Jack Tanner from the mockumentary Tanner ’88), who concoct stories about what transpired in a way that leaves viewers constantly guessing what is true and what isn’t. Did Bob Dylan really have a fling with a teenaged, then-unknown Sharon Stone during the tour? (Nope!) Was Dylan inspired by the rock band Kiss to don face paint during the tour? (No, the use of white face paint was in homage to the 1945 French film, Children of Paradise, which was the primary inspiration for Renaldo and Clara.) Did Jimmy Carter call Bob Dylan to get hopeful congressman, Jack Tanner, tickets to the tour’s show in Niagara? (You get the idea….) One particularly funny example is when the fictional filmmaker, Stefan van Dorp (played by actor Martin von Haselberg), brags about introducing Dylan to the “European way” to hold a cigarette (“After that night at Ginsburg’s, Bob started holding [his cigarette] like that too. That was me!”). The film is more than simply blurring the divide between fact and fiction in scenes like this. It is poking fun at pop music fandom more generally: the obsession with minutiae, the longing for access, the endless retrospection. Dylan nods at this from the very outset of the film when he turns to the camera in his famously prickly, mischievous way: “I don’t have a clue [what the tour was about], because it’s about nothing. It’s just something that happened 40 years ago. And that’s the truth of it.”

But the staged scenes and the blurring of fact and fiction isn’t all Scorsese’s doing. Renaldo and Clara, which is the source of most of the original footage, likewise blurs truth and untruth by mixing documentary footage and staged dramatic scenes. The reflexivity is thus multi-layered in the Rolling Thunder Revue. For example, one scene in the documentary has Dylan and Joan Baez chatting together in a dimly lit bar, reminiscing about the past in an unguarded moment between the two former lovers, seeming to regret their failed romance. (Dylan quips, “it really displeases me that you went off and got married,” to which Baez responds, “You went off and got married first and didn’t tell me.”) The scene recalls some of the finer moments of Don’t Look Back, in which viewers are privy to footage of touching intimacy between Baez and Dylan, drinking wine and jamming amongst friends in smoke-filled hotel rooms. Only the scene here is from the filming of Renaldo and Clara, and Baez and Dylan are merely playing characters. Or are they? Viewers are left to wonder. Scenes like this pile irony on top of irony, riffing on the meta-awareness of the original footage from Renaldo and Clara by adding yet another level of irony for viewers to contend with.

The role-playing, however, isn’t limited to the fictional scenes, but includes the concert footage as well. Dylan first appears on stage singing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song from his Greenwich Village days, but his appearance is strikingly off-kilter for those who would remember the early Dylan, his face now heavily made-up and covered in white paint, wearing a wide-brimmed hat ostentatiously decked in a crown of flowers. Later we see images of Dylan performing in a mask (the same mask he wears at the very opening of Renaldo and Clara), as well as a scene in which Joan Baez performs in costume posing as Dylan, wearing the same getup, hat, and white face paint (this parallels Ronnie Hawkins playing the character “Bob Dylan” in Renaldo and Clara; while Dylan plays the role of his alter-ego, Renaldo, in the film). As Dylan explains to the camera: “When someone is wearing a mask, he’s going to tell you the truth.”

The idea of role-playing and traversing the line between fact and fiction is quintessentially Dylan—a point that has always been central to his public persona. For critics, his willingness to play with the truth about himself and his identity has invited all kinds of attacks. Lester Bangs, for example, knocks Dylan for his “reputation second only to David Bowie for image-mongering, and second to none for mythmaking” (1976:69). But a less cynical take on Dylan’s unreliability as a storyteller might be to understand this aspect of his performing style as grounded in his folk music ideals. He writes, for example, in the Chronicles (Reference Dylan2004:71):

Here too, one might be tempted to be sceptical as to whether to take statements like this on face value; as David Yaffe (Reference Yaffe and Kevin2009) points out, Dylan’s assertions about the Anglo-American folk music tradition can be described as contradictory and self-serving. To paraphrase Bangs (Reference Bangs1976:69), you never know when Dylan is being straight with you.

Of course, for fans the truth reveals itself in the music. In the Rolling Thunder Revue, whatever fictions the film conjures up in its playful use of “behind-the-scenes” footage and staged scenes, whatever metacommentary it wants to tell, it is in the musical performances that one finds the real Dylan. Indeed, Dylan’s performances are electric throughout the film. The scene, for example, of Dylan and his backing band singing “Hurricane”; or the footage of Joni Mitchell leading Dylan and other musicians from the tour in a jam session in Gordon Lightfoot’s living room (playing Mitchell’s song “Coyote”). In footage like this, there is no mischief or irony to be decoded, just music.

The film also aims to situate the tour in the context of the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War, around the time of the 1976 United States Bicentennial celebrations. At the opening of the film, we see a montage of stock footage from the Bicentennial, including shots of parade floats, marching bands, hawkers peddling Bicentennial souvenirs, a cake in the design of an American flag, all of which unfolds to the sound of Dylan singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Then we see a closeup of Dylan today reflecting back on the period, as he says to the camera, “Saigon had fallen. People had seemed to have lost their sense of conviction for just about anything.” This is immediately followed by footage of Richard Nixon mouthing platitudes about what he calls “the American Spirit”—a man who would resign in disgrace just a year before the tour would kick off. This is a key point of contrast, as Sam Shepard notes in the documentary, between the phony patriotism of the Bicentennial celebrations and the tour, which played small towns in the grip of de-industrialisation; as he puts it “particularly in the little towns, you know, they didn’t give a shit [about the Bicentennial]…they certainly weren’t celebrating the birth of America.” According to Shepard, these fans turned to music for solace.

The Revue tour, in other words, stands as a testament to the post-countercultural moment in America, the end of the idealism and hopefulness of the sixties generation, for which Dylan was such an iconic figure. This is the America that is cynical and unmoored, seemingly adrift in the aftermath of the tumult of the 1960s. Perhaps nowhere is this more explicit than in the figure of Allen Ginsburg, who looms large in the film—another icon of the sixties era, albeit in this case, an almost buffoonish character playing the role of an ageing hippy. (The point is perhaps further driven home in the scene in which Dylan and Ginsburg read poetry at Jack Kerouac’s grave in Massachusetts. The beat generation, Greenwich Village, the folk era––it’s all gone now.) The cliché of Dylan as sixties folk music hero, the “voice of a generation”, is a thing of distant memory.

And yet, the effort to locate Dylan in this particular historical moment seems forced at times, as Shepard seems to let on—no one thought much about the Bicentennial during the tour, and yet it is a constant touchpoint for the film’s narrative.Footnote ² Is it simply to “give context” to a music tour that defies easy categorisation? The documentary seems to hint at the apparent disconnect between the tour and its supposed zeitgeist when the fictional filmmaker Stefan van Dorp refers to his uncompleted film of the tour as meaning “to show the counterpoint between the excesses of the people on the tour and the dissolution of society.” Is this yet another instance of irony on top of irony? Is this Scorsese’s way of telling us to not take the film’s historical contextualising too seriously?

Or maybe context isn’t really the goal. The Bicentennial is just another version of what Greil Marcus (Reference Marcus2011) calls “old weird America”, another piece of Americana for artists like Dylan—or Scorsese—to draw upon and to recreate and rework through song and performance. As Marcus convincingly argues, Dylan’s move away from the folk music scene of the 1960s can be partly understood as a turn towards a more stylised, more abstract definition of folk music. The “folk” in this sense doesn’t necessarily have a “volk” in the Herderian sense of the term to turn to for inspiration or meaning, but rather finds its purpose in certain aesthetic and stylistic ideals that celebrate the arcane, the obscure, the quaint. In this regard, the grainy footage of the Bicentennial celebrations, of marching bands parading in small-town America, seems as if from another world.

Still, another way to think of the emphasis the film places on the Bicentennial is to foreground the importance of myth-making in pop cultural memory. Just as references to the founding of America in the film are soaked through with irony, so too does the film call attention to the endless retrospection and mythologising on the part of Dylan fans. The key difference, then, between this film and Scorsese’s No Direction Home is that the latter seems content to stay true to those myths, while the former is eager to call them into question.