Rolling Thunder Revue Review

This review comes from my Letterboxd profile, where I review all of the movies I see.

In a lot of ways, this is a conservative rating for me because, for a while, I couldn't quite jump on board with whatever this movie was going for, but after finishing it, I'm pretty sure I love it. I think I may need a bit more time with this movie before I decide whether or not I fully loved it or not, so I should explain my experience with this film.

I've been curious about Rolling Thunder Revue for a while. What exactly did Martin Scorsese have to say about the songwriting and performing legend himself, and how would he say it? Was it a biopic or a documentary or a concert film or something else completely? Turns out, it's a little bit of everything I just listed. It doesn't cover Bob Dylan's songwriting career as a whole, as I would have expected. Instead, it covers an entire touring group I had never heard of until this documentary, a giant group of beloved musicians that gathered together to tour and perform what they were passionate about. There are various stories told by different people involved in this group, including Dylan himself, but not everything in this movie is true. There are made-up characters and events, doctored photos and dialogue, and unclear descriptions of where some of the footage came from that even Dylan seems to acknowledge as completely, 100% factual. It's like the music documentary version of Abbas Kiarostami's brilliant Close-Up, where certain elements of the film were either fabricated or re-filmed to create the experience of a full-on documentary. In fact, that film was apparently Scorsese's biggest influence in this project.

In the case of Rolling Thunder Revue, I'm not entirely sure about how I feel about that particular format. With Close-Up, the film quickly acknowledges that every person involved in the actual film is playing themselves, allowing the audience to understand that some of the events in the film are dramatized and therefore increasing the curiosity about how many of the events themselves are dramatized. In this film, there really isn't any hint that any of this footage could be fabricated, because while the majority of it isn't, you have characters that don't exist speaking in footage that they obviously weren't around for and real-life figures claiming that things that clearly didn't happen were true. Because of that, even though I'm sure the intention of blurring reality and fiction was there from the start, it feels like it's trying to convince the audience a bit too much that it's real to the point where people like me, who literally have never heard of the Rolling Thunder Venue before, would think everything in this film was real.

In fact, I did until about halfway through the movie. For the first half of the film, I watched this with my parents, but after two or three of the song sequences, it became clear that this was not the style of Bob Dylan that my parents particularly cared for. On top of that, sequences where drugged-out musicians talk about philosophical sounding concepts genuinely angered them to the point where my mom walked into another room halfway through. My dad and I paused the film at that point, and I watched the rest of it on my own. At that point, completely unaffected by my parent's irritation at the actions of the drug scene in the 1970s and their annoyance of the style of music, in particular, the last hour of this movie absolutely breezed by for me. This is a movie that I think I need to watch again on my own at some point to really wrap my head around what I think about it, because while I'm still unsure about how the format of this film is used to tell its story and that it's trying a little TOO hard to convince the audience that every event is real, it's still a really fascinatingly made documentary that at times felt like a fever dream. Seriously, this film made me loopy like no other film has made me before, and I think that speaks to the tone and atmosphere that Scorsese was able to capture with the time period here. I don't know, guys, this is a strange movie. Don't go into this expecting a full-on documentary because that's not what you're gonna get. Expect some strange discussions, expect elongated song sequences, and expect a partially longer running time that's gonna be worth it if you're willing to be patient with this film's storytelling.

Letter Grade: A-