Sean Burns
Kurt Cobain once called Dont Look Back the only good documentary about rock n’ roll. Most 1960s counterculture relics were objects of ridicule for the grunge generation, but it’s easy to see why director D.A. Pennebaker’s scruffy, fly-on-the-wall hangout movie would resonate with Cobain’s defiantly ratty sensibility. From the missing apostrophe in the title to the herky-jerky, handheld camera and constantly slipping focus, Pennebaker’s film follows Bob Dylan on a two-week tour of England in the spring of 1965 with none of the spit and polish one associates with showbiz docs. The film’s concert scenes present only short snippets of songs, while we’re privy to boring backstage idylls in which the subjects screw around, killing time. We watch managers negotiate deals, followed by drunken arguments that go nowhere and interviews that go south in a hurry. It’s a lot of bumpy rides from one nondescript hotel room to another, probably the most accurate depiction ever filmed of the tensions and tedium of life on the road.
It’s also a glimpse of Dylan mid-metamorphosis. After returning from England, that coming summer he would record “Highway 61 Revisited” and plug in at the Newport Folk Festival – turning his back forever on the affable folkie persona with which he’d initially won over the world. Onstage, you can see him rushing through “The Times They Are a Changin’” while really digging into newer, more challenging songs like “Love Minus Zero / No Limit.” Dont Look Back captures his final acoustic tour and the birth of the elusive trickster Dylan, clowning around with tour manager/sidekick/instigator Bob Neuwirth amid a revolving entourage of friends and hangers-on. Joan Baez is along for unspecified reasons, until she abruptly isn’t — ominously closing a hotel room door and disappearing from the film altogether as Dylan types away, ignoring her.
Pennebaker’s verité style eschews identifying any of the figures circling the singer’s orbit. Part of the fun is in sorting out the relationships and situations, trying to ride the vibes amid pre-concert jitters and post-show revels. After Dont Look Back was rejected by every legit studio in town, an adult film distributor famously told the director that they liked the movie because it looked and sounded like a porno. Pennebaker loved telling that story, I think because it gets to a larger idea behind the movie’s appeal: It feels like something we’re not supposed to be seeing. Dont Look Back is like the first bootleg – made up of all the scenes from behind the scenes that official releases would have cut out.
Famously, this is not the most flattering portrait of Dylan. He can be testy and mercurial, admittedly while under the kind of pressures that mere mortals like you and I couldn’t imagine. The reason I loved Dont Look Back as a younger man was because of how much fun it is to watch Bob being an asshole. (In college we played the old Laserdisc so many times that the endlessly quotable lines became part of our dorm room vernacular: “Be groovy or leave.”) I feel like it’s been blown a bit out of proportion over the years, but there’s no denying the wolfish grin Dylan gets after Donovan attempts to impress the hotel party with an innocuous little folk ditty. Bob takes the guitar and offers possibly facetious words of encouragement to the Scottish singer, before blowing everyone away with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
One person who didn’t find this nearly as funny as my friends and I did was critic Roger Ebert, who in his infuriated original review described Dylan as “immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright.” Revisiting the film 30 years later, Ebert added that the singer was also “a self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey.” (Ebert’s disgust with Dylan is a funny recurring motif throughout his career. His scorching coverage of the singer’s 2003 appearance at the Sundance Film Festival is some of his most vitriolic writing.)
For his part, Dylan didn’t seem too bothered by how he comes off in the film. According to Pennebaker, after an initial screening, the singer said he wanted to watch it again and would take notes about what needed to be cut. The director said that Dylan sat in the front row with a large legal pad in his lap, and after the closing credits rolled Bob held up the pad and laughed. It was completely blank.
Returning to Dont Look Back as an older man, Dylan seems far more reasonable to me. He’s a scrawny, smart-alecky, 24-year-old kid being crushed under colossal expectations, trying to wrest free of a role he never signed up for as the voice of a generation. (And we wonder why Kurt Cobain responded to this movie so?) During the film’s infamously contentious interview with a TIME Magazine reporter, Dylan says, “I don’t have anything to say about the songs I wrote. I wrote them.” This time around, I was reminded of how the late David Lynch would graciously refuse to answer questions about the meanings behind his work, politely insisting that the work itself contained all the explanation that was needed. To people like this, their art is everything. Why do we keep asking them for more?
“Dont Look Back” is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max.
