Starring: Bob Dylan, foes, friends and followers
Director: Martin Scorsese
The film: Bob Dylan has certainly opened up of late. Last year, popular music's notoriously tight-lipped troubadour released his entertaining memoir, Chronicles - Volume One. Then came a fine collection of unpublished and unseen archive material in The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956-1966.
But that was all just to prepare us for No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, maverick movie-maker Martin Scorsese's sensational 200-plus minute examination of what was, arguably, the singer-songwriter's most fertile artistic period (1960-66).
In many ways this is a conventional documentary, but Scorsese's pacing and attention to detail enliven the storytelling. Opening with details of Robert Allen Zimmerman's childhood in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, it swiftly moves through the coffee houses of New York's Greenwich Village and how he set about creating Bob Dylan in the image of his folk hero, Woody Guthrie.
Disc one ends with Dylan's performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and spotlights just how big he'd become in that community.