It’s also a glimpse of Dylan mid-metamorphosis. After returning from England, that coming summer he would record \u201cHighway 61 Revisited\u201d and plug in at the Newport Folk Festival \u2013 turning his back forever on the affable folkie persona with which he\u2019d initially won over the world. Onstage, you can see him rushing through \u201cThe Times They Are a Changin\u2019\u201d while really digging into newer, more challenging songs like \u201cLove Minus Zero \/ No Limit.\u201d Dont Look Back<\/em> 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\u2019t — ominously closing a hotel room door and disappearing from the film altogether as Dylan types away, ignoring her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pennebaker\u2019s verit\u00e9 style eschews identifying any of the figures circling the singer\u2019s 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<\/em> 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\u2019s appeal: It feels like something we\u2019re not supposed to be seeing. Dont Look Back<\/em> is like the first bootleg \u2013 made up of all the scenes from behind the scenes that official releases would have cut out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t imagine. The reason I loved Dont Look Back<\/em> 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: \u201cBe groovy or leave.\u201d) I feel like it\u2019s been blown a bit out of proportion over the years, but there\u2019s 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 \u201cIt\u2019s All Over Now, Baby Blue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One person who didn\u2019t find this nearly as funny as my friends and I did was critic Roger Ebert, who in his infuriated original review<\/a> described Dylan as \u201cimmature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright.\u201d Revisiting the film 30 years later, Ebert added<\/a> that the singer was also \u201ca self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey.\u201d (Ebert\u2019s disgust with Dylan is a funny recurring motif throughout his career. His scorching coverage<\/a> of the singer\u2019s 2003 appearance at the Sundance Film Festival is some of his most vitriolic writing<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n For his part, Dylan didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to Dont Look Back<\/em> as an older man, Dylan seems far more reasonable to me. He\u2019s 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\u2019s infamously contentious interview with a TIME Magazine reporter, Dylan says, \u201cI don\u2019t have anything to say about the songs I wrote. I wrote them.\u201d 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Dont Look Back” is streaming on the Criterion Channel <\/a>and Max<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/dont-look-back2-1024x768.jpeg\")
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