Bob Dylan’s Exquisite Bullshit

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Martin Scorsese’s new film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, starts with a vanishing act. A man in a top-hat drapes a patterned sheet over a woman in a chair. When he flicks the sheet away, she’s gone. Now you see her, now you don’t. It’s a scene from Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, and it makes a fine beginning for a film wreathed in a ton of tricks and tall tales.

Rolling Thunder Revue is about a ramshackle tour that Bob Dylan cobbled together in 1975 and called the Rolling Thunder Revue. He assembled a few dozen musicians, poets, filmmakers, and friends, and took them on the road. He had Allen Ginsberg along, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, T Bone Burnett, Sam Shepard, Roger McGuinn (from The Byrds), Mick Ronson (from David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars), and the poet Anne Waldman; and Joan Baez joined the tour, and Joni Mitchell did, and Patti Smith made an appearance. They played small venues in small towns with little advance notice. Onstage, they wore costumes and masks and painted their faces. And they made tremendous music—vital and wild—with Dylan gesticulating at the center.

Scorsese uses concert footage, backstage footage, interviews with the central and not-so-central players, newsreel clips, and anything else he fancies, for a film