"My only real plan is to become a singer..."

Rating: 8/10 (6 July 2011)

On May 30th of this year, pollster Scott Rasmussen conducted a national telephone survey on Bob Dylan, and thirty seven percent of the respondents stated they didn't know enough about him to voice any kind of opinion at all. If I had to guess, that roughly one in three who doesn't know Dylan is only going to grow, and I say that with no disrespect or put down of his music. It's just that time goes by and people move on to other things, and Dylan isn't very topical today, considering how ubiquitous his voice was during the turbulent era of the Sixties.
Fortunately, I've seen the documentary "No Direction Home", and was able to draw enough parallels between that film and this biopic to have a hint of what was going on. Otherwise, one could easily get lost among the character switches that comprise the story, seeing as how the players are so disparate and seemingly unconnected. My favorites were Cate Blanchett as your basic Dylan, and young Marcus Carl Franklin who traces the singer back to his early blues roots. What I found frustrating though, is that in his attempts to defy classification, Dylan goes to the extreme of a Bill Clinton who once got hung up on what the definition of 'is' is. But I think the frustration went both ways. In "No Direction Home", Dylan tries to answer a reporter about the meaning of an album cover, when all it was to him was his picture on an album cover. For Dylan, it didn't have to get more complicated than that.
This film won't be for everyone, but I found it entertaining enough to give it a whirl again some time down the road. For your musical tastes, there's only a brief sampling of the early stuff that gained him his reputation, but I found it all to be a nice mix that didn't overwhelm the picture.
What I found odd however was a statement following the closing credits that you had to hang around for until the very end. There in black and white, it said "This motion picture is fictional, but certain characters and actions have been inspired by real people and real events". Seeing as how Dylan wasn't mentioned by name even once, that statement seemed to offer the film maker cover for any artistic stretches provided by the story. I've never seen or heard a response by Dylan to the film, so I have to wonder what he thinks, or if he was even there.