Review: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Image courtesy of Netflix.

"Freedom just around the corner for you, but with the truth so far off what good will it do?" Bob Dylan sings in his 1983 song "Jokerman." The legendary troubadour teams up with director Martin Scorsese, who shows a knack for trickster behavior himself in his latest film, for "Rolling Thunder Revue," a kind-of documentary that chronicles a legendary, but low key, tour that Dylan undertook around the time of the nation's 1976 bicentennial, but includes a fair amount of fiction as well - a trait that the picture takes no pains to hide, although you might think it did, considering some of the grousing about it.

Launching shortly after the end of the Vietnam War and the stepping down of another president who broke the law and attempted to weaponize the nation's justice system, the Rolling Thunder Revue was a ragtag group of poets and musicians who traveled from city to city across the east coast, often with no advance warning, and played small venues. The tour was launched shortly before the release of Dylan's marvelous 1976 record "Desire" and, at various points, drew such participants as Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell,  Roger McGuinn, of The Byrds, and Mick Ronson, a guitarist for David Bowie. They're all featured in the documentary, and they're occasionally joined by others - Patti Smith and Bette Midler, for example.

The tour - and this documentary - include some of Dylan's finest live performances. He performs several of his iconic songs - "Isis" and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," for example - with an intensity you might not expect for a guy who, at that point, hadn't been on tour for eight years. Although Dylan has long attempted to shed the protest image of his early folk years, his work to help free wrongly accused boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and the subsequent song he wrote about him show the singer at his most focused, while his backup band - including the incredible violin work by Scarlet Rivera - on the tour is among the best he's ever had.

The semi-fuss caused by the film involves a series of sequences that is being referred to as the "four jokers." These are fake interviews - one with Sharon Stone, in which she insinuates that she had some sort of fling with Dylan during the tour; another with a fake music promoter; a third with Jack Tanner (played by Michael Murphy), a politician character from a 1988 Robert Altman film; and a recurring character known as Stefan Van Dorp (portrayed by Martin Von Haselberg, Midler's husband), a European filmmaker who has mostly snarky things to say about the people on the tour, which he claims to have filmed as a documentary.

The only real surprise here is that anyone familiar with Bob Dylan would be taken aback by this. Dylan has long portrayed himself as a trickster figure. He's been the subject of several movies - including the four-hour fever dream "Renaldo and Clara," for which footage was collected during the tour, and the mesmerizing "I'm Not There," during which no less than five actors portrayed Dylan at various stages of his life - and numerous documentaries. And yet, when trying to capture his essence, it's still difficult, considering how often he's been on film.

At one point during the film, he notes that "when somebody is wearing a mask, he's going to tell you the truth; when he's not wearing a mask, it's highly unlikely." That's probably the truest thing that Dylan will tell you about himself in "Rolling Thunder Revue." On the tour, Dylan often performs with Kabuki-style makeup, although he's willing to let audiences believe that he stole the concept from KISS, and hides behind various other costumes. At one point, he even gets Baez in on playing dress up.

"Rolling Thunder Revue" is at once a gripping documentary on the 1975-1976 tour, a series of beautifully captured concert sequences, a humorous prank regarding attempts to understand one of rock's most enigmatic figures and great a time capsule piece. Scorsese has worked with Dylan before, so rather than digging deep to try to explain him - a likely fruitless feat - he gets in the spirit of the thing and provides a carnivalesque-styled film that suits the nature of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. This is a riveting film.