Over the decades, the documentary work of director Martin Scorsese has grown to rival the breadth and pedigree of his narrative features. Applied with the same personal touch that makes his theatrical films so distinctive, his documentaries are just as essential in the conversation about his cinematic legacy. Whether he’s exploring his immigrant heritage in films like ITALIANAMERICAN (1974) or MY VOYAGE TO ITALY (2001), or profiling notable figures like Fran Lebowitz in PUBLIC SPEAKING (2010), Scorsese makes documentaries that speak to his personal interests and passions. Not unexpectedly, his deep love for music — specifically, the rock and roll titans of his generation — figures as a prominent recurring subject. 

No persona in this realm looms as large as Bob Dylan, the slippery, shape-shifting folk trickster troubadour whose wistful ballads have captured the world’s imagination. Scorsese had previously explored Dylan’s legacy with his 2005 documentary NO DIRECTION HOME, and in the process had developed a relationship with Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen. Over a decade later, Rosen had approached Scorsese with a new potential project, shaped from archival footage shot in the mid-1970’s during Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour. In assessing the mountain of accumulated footage, it was clear that enough material existed to capture an intimate look at some of rock’s greatest luminaries during a pivotal era in the genre’s history. Leave it to Scorsese, however, to find a deeper approach. Released in 2019 as the opening salvo in the filmmaker’s tradition-disrupting partnership with Netflix, ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY finds Scorsese parlaying his retroactive backstage access to ruminate on the nature of storytelling itself, blurring the line between our romanticized memories of the past and the factual record while  simultaneously acknowledging and puncturing the national myths that shape our cultural identity.

Far from a straightforward concert documentary, ROLLING THUNDER REVUE is a mischievous meditation on the act of storytelling itself, filled with unreliable narrators and the creeping sense that nothing is quite what it seems. Scorsese provides his audience with the appropriate lens at the outset, pairing a clip from George Méliés’ 1896 film THE CONJURING OF A WOMAN AT THE HOUSE OF ROBERT HOUDIN with the documentary’s title card… which oddly enough bears an alternate, similar title: CONJURING THE ROLLING THUNDER RE-VUE. The word “conjuring” is the key; what follows is an elaborate smoke-and-mirrors show that speaks to the magic of stagecraft and the ability to shape our reality through the language of myth. 

At the center of it all is Dylan himself, interviewed in the present day and insisting that he has little memory of the tour even as he expounds at length and in great detail about the veritable rogue’s gallery of Beat Generation luminaries who joined him on the road. Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Joan Baez, Sam Shepard and Joanie Mitchell impart a lasting impression in their respective appearances, with Scorsese crediting them with character names like The Writer (Shepard), The Punk Poet (Smith), or The Oracle of Delphi (Ginsberg). There’s also the presence of CASINO actress Sharon Stone as The Beauty Queen, who describes her whirlwind experience as a brief muse of Dylan’s during her time on the tour— despite never actually having met Dylan in reality. Those photos of the two together that prove the validity of her story? Photoshopped fakes. Then there’s actor Michael Murphy, whose filmed interview finds him effortlessly slipping back into the fictional politician he played in Robert Altman’s TANNER ‘88 (1988) (1) to describe an after-hours meeting between Dylan and President Jimmy Carter. As one can guess, that never happened either. 

The film’s biggest fabrication, however, is the inclusion of testimony from the man who allegedly captured all this footage to begin with: filmmaker Stefan van Dorp. He sits down to an interview as a means to reclaim his authorship of the footage— and subsequently, his place in our shared cultural history. The only thing is that the filmmaker Stefan van Dorp doesn’t actually exist. He too is a fictional character, played by Better Midler’s husband, Martin von Haselberg (10), and the mountain of footage he claims to have shot is, in reality, a collection of outtakes from RENALDO AND CLARA, a 1978 film that Dylan shot in tandem with the Rolling Thunder tour (1). A handful of camera people are responsible for the original footage: Howard Alk, Paul Goldsmith, Ellen Kuras, and David Myers. Their handiwork has been digitally restored to a shining luster from a scratchy 16mm workprint in lieu of the long-gone original negative; the objective nature of the documentary concert performance footage and various backstage shenanigans has been spun into a carnivalesque new fiction by editors Damian Rodriguez and David Tedeschi. The newly shot interviews, captured by Rosen in Scorsese’s absence due to his being in production on SILENCE (3), are digital acquisitions that have been touched up by effects filters and deliberate color grading to emulate film.

With all this fakery and deceit, what are we to trust? The answer, as Dylan himself might say, is everything and nothing. The sum total of all these tall tales is itself a kind of honesty— it is the emotional truth that Scorsese values so highly in his fiction filmmaking. Of all the various personas Dylan has presented over the years, ROLLING THUNDER REVUE depicts a variation we rarely see, his faced slathered in splotchy white grease paint like a bohemian ghost, or a child cosplaying as Kiss (in his interview, Dylan even goes so far as to draw a direct — if fake — connection to Kiss’ iconic look as inspiration for his own). At one point in the film, Dylan ruminates to camera on the peculiar nature of masks, and their habit of allowing the wearer to be their most honest, direct selves. In this light, a mask is not an obfuscation of identity so much as it is a reflection. The theatricality resonates well against the filmmakers’ framing of the American Bicentennial, which is given a heftier thematic weight than it likely did in real life. The arrival of the United States’ 200th year was marked by profound uncertainties and anxieties at home and abroad, with the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s resignation still fresh in history’s rearview. Our collective national identity had been unmoored by all this destruction and corruption, and it would fall to our myth makers — the singers, the poets, the artists — to help us reclaim it. 

As an artist who can most definitely be counted amongst the raconteurs who shaped America, Scorsese is simply incapable of working without a personal connection to the project at hand. Despite having shot none of the footage himself, Scorsese nevertheless makes it his own.  ROLLING THUNDER REVUE joins other celebrated rock documentaries like SHINE A LIGHT (2008), NO DIRECTION HOME, or THE LAST WALTZ (1978), creating in the process a multi-faceted chronicle of rock and roll’s formative years. The aforementioned inclusion of Méliés’ THE CONJURING OF A WOMAN AT THE HOUSE OF ROBERT HOUDIN at film’s opening speaks to Scorsese’s passion for cinema history and preservation (and is a further nod to the magic of Méliés he so lovingly portrayed in 2011’s HUGO). The story begins in earnest under the looming twin shadows of the World Trade Center, giving this sprawling road a story a firm anchor in New York City. There’s even a short sequence depicting a candlelit Gypsy concert in an underground church, which allows Scorsese to indulge in his fascination with the theatricality of Catholic iconography.

As the first of a handful of projects produced for Netflix, ROLLING THUNDER REVUE flies a fair bit under the radar, thanks in no part to the streamer’s avoidance of marketing and the fickle brutality of its algorithm. It was well-received by critics, most of whom were vocal in their appreciation for the slippery mischievousness of Scorsese’s approach. More importantly, it maintains Dylan’s trademark mystique, adding ever-more wrinkles of obfuscation into a figure who already rivals the Sphinx in his enigmatic nature. As a filmmaker rapidly approaching his 80’s, Scorsese’s work on ROLLING THUNDER REVUE demonstrates that he is sharper — and more playful — than ever. Some may be quick to dismiss the subject matter as stale Boomer nostalgia, but Scorsese’s narrative dexterity facilitates a timeless throughline that’s about so much more than a rock-and-roll concert tour from half a century ago. ROLLING THUNDER REVUE was never about Bob Dylan— it’s about the integral role that artists play in our national identity… and the romantic, swashbuckling humanity we stand to lose in the Age of Content, where the arts are only valued in direct proportion to their contribution to the bottom line or to the number of subscribers they retain. 

That Scorsese has to make this plea on Netflix, of all places, only proves his point. Much has been written about the streamers’ ability to offer unencumbered creative freedom to filmmakers, but we’re beginning to catch on to the idea that this “advantage” masks a fundamental disinterest in the works themselves. In a subscriber-based model, the draw is the wider library in aggregate. Their adoption of the word “content” instead of “films” or “movies” is revealing, as is the deliberate lack of marketing resources deployed towards any individual offering. To his credit, Scorsese is taking this all in stride, taking full advantage of these unexpected streaming partnerships to embark on a new phase of creativity marked by uncompromising storytelling and hard questions asked of both himself and of us. In the process, he’s weaving himself even deeper into the fabric of our national identity, and cementing himself as an inextricable component of our cultural character.

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE is currently available as a high-definition stream on Netflix and on high-definition Blu Ray via The Criterion Collection.

Credits:

Produced by: Margaret Bodde, Jeff Rosen

Directors of Photography: Howard Alk, Paul Goldsmith, Ellen Kuras, David Myers

Edited by: Damian Rodriguez, David Tedeschi

References:

1. IMDB Trivia Page