★★★★
In an alchemic mix of fact and fantasy, Martin Scorsese looks back at Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour and a country ripe for reinvention.
Classification: 15
A fascinating folktale that bends the truth just like any retelling of a story from one to the other, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese feels like the recounting of a mythical journey across an America in crisis. A documentary drama that creates its own narrative with fictional interviews and fabricated stories not to deceive its audience per se but to challenge them, as so much of the film is footage and performances from the 1975 tour. As time passes, truth dilutes and Scorsese’s documentary uses fictional stand-ins to represent facets of America, Sharon Stone as the rebellious youth, Michael Murphy as the politicians, Martin von Haselberg as the disgruntled artist. 1975 was a tumultuous era for America and Scorsese frames all the material from concert footage, interviews and newsreels to show how Rolling Thunder Revue was an avenue for artistic healing.
At times Rolling Thunder Revue is almost dreamlike as one can just drift from story to story accompanied by really remarkable footage and extended sequences of Dylan and co performing. This footage is bookended by modern interviews from Dylan and key figures from the tour which reenforce the folktale aspect of the film. It has a vignette-like style at times as the documentary focuses on subjects important to the tour such as the connection to the name Rolling Thunder and Dylan’s connection with Rubin Carter. A lot of the footage came from Renaldo and Clara, a film Dylan made during the tour and Scorsese incorporates and repurposes it into his story so well. The origins of the footage are one of the elements that have its truth distorted but never do these distortions feel distracting, in fact without prior knowledge or research one may believe everything they see in Rolling Thunder Revue.
It captures the feel and tone of the era so well as the ratio between restored footage and modern-day interviews really favours the former. Scorsese even incorporates interviews taken during the tour to really immerse the audience in the story, it really feels like a time capsule at times. It never feels like a history lesson especially because of the fictional elements but like a distant memory of America, every time we tell a story we may forget a detail and add our own to fill in the gap and I feel that is what Scorsese is trying to bring across. As the years go by, our collective memories won’t be the actual truth but the truth we made for ourselves. Rolling Thunder Revue captures a journey across America, a journey of people and of ideas but Scorsese is trying to tell us that as we constantly change, our truth will change with us. America in itself has a revisionist history, trying to erase it sins to hold itself up on a pedestal and Rolling Thunder Revue represents one of these points of history where the country wanted to heal and move on from the pain of Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon and so many other tragedies from the past decade.
There is so much to unpack and process from this documentary, Scorsese paints a beautiful portrait of Americana and the bohemian lifestyle. Even in a passive viewing, there is so much to absorb from the sheer content that encompasses the runtime. The way fiction and the fact blend together becomes an afterthought at times when you see Dylan perform, when you see the emotion he invokes from the audience. Fictional or factual truth becomes irrelevant only the emotional truth we can create collectively, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is about how we come together to do just that.
Director: #MartinScorsese
Cast: #BobDylan, #AllenGinsberg, #JoanBaez, #LarrySloman, #MartinVonHalsberg, #ScarletRivera, #SamShepard, #SharonStone
Release Date: June 12th 2019
Available exclusively on Netflix.
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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