I watched No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary, and I agree with David Greenberg's assessment in Slate that this is a compulsively watchable but ultimately trite display of "boomer nostalgia" — a standard narrative of Dylan as bellwether of sixties culture. Yes, the archival footage is astounding, the cast of characters entertaining, the editing brilliant. But all kinds of opportunities were missed to probe the sources of the music — the background on Woody Guthrie, for example, is threadbare — and the questions that were asked of Dylan himself were apparently the most obvious ones. Dylan, for his part, doesn't let down his bitter-cool mask, and he's not as surprising or as revealing as he was in his memoir Chronicles. Nonetheless, he has some striking things to say. "An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere," he says at one point. "You always have to realize you're constantly in a state of becoming. As long as you can stay in that realm, you'll sort of be alright." That's the realm that Scorsese can't enter. Instead, he plays "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" as the soundtrack to the Kennedy assassination.
