No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
Spitfire Pictures

Description

Portrait of an artist as a young man. Roughly chronological, using archival footage intercut with recent interviews, a story takes shape of Bob Dylan's (b. 1941) coming of age from 1961 to 1966 as a singer, songwriter, performer, and star. He takes from others: singing styles, chord changes, and rare records.

He keeps moving: on stage, around New York City and on tour, from Suze Rotolo to Joan Baez and on, from songs of topical witness to songs of raucous independence, from folk to rock. He drops the past. He refuses, usually with humor and charm, to be simplified, classified, categorized, or finalized: always becoming, we see a shapeshifter on a journey with no direction home.

Tags

1960s

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Variety | Phil Gallo

No Direction Home is an honest documentary that rejects myths about rock music's greatest songwriter and attempts to capture the truth about Bob Dylan, who chooses to play it straight for once, avoiding the mind and word games he has played with interviewers for five decades.
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10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Creates a portrait that is deep, sympathetic, perceptive and yet finally leaves Dylan shrouded in mystery, which is where he properly lives.
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10 digitallyobsessed.com | Jon Danziger

It's difficult to determine who is more fortunate: Martin Scorsese, for being given a story to tell brimming with potency and pungency, or Bob Dylan, for having such an empathetic biographer with the keenest possible ear for popular music and culture.
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10 DVD Verdict | David Gutierrez

Bob Dylan: No Direction Home is what I'd call the perfect documentary. It takes its subject and presents him and the world around him. It makes understanding Bob Dylan easy. It makes Dylan even more interesting (if that were even possible). It made me break out my Dylan collection. What more can a film do?
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10 DVD Talk | Bill Gibron

Instantly taking its place as a classic of the genre - and possibly one of the greatest rock and roll documentaries ever helmed - No Direction Home proves once and for all what fans always understood, but what most outside Bob Dylan's sphere of influence were hard pressed to see.
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9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Keith Phipps

If Martin Scorsese ever had any intention of getting to the bottom of it with his three-and-a-half-hour documentary No Direction Home, it didn't work out, but that doesn't make the film any less extraordinary.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

When you get to the end, you want to start all over again. That's the No. 1 reason to own the DVD version of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home."
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8.0 PopMatters.com | John G. Nettles

If No Direction Home is about anything, it's about Dylan's early life among the Mister Joneses of his era, ahead of rock-and-roll's learning curve and suffering the judgments of the slower kids in his class. It's not a historical document but it asks an important question: who owns the artist, him or his audience?
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