In 1961 a young Jewish kid from Minnesota burst onto the Greenwich Village music scene with lyrics put to music unlike any ever heard before. In the documentary No Direction Home, legendary director Martin Scorsese, who previously filmed him before with his band The Band in The Last Waltz, takes us through Bob Dylan's explosive creative stage from this point up until 1966 when he went electric. We briefly go through his childhood and young adult years where we see the eclectic music that inspired him. We then go on to see how Dylan dropped out of college, ventured to New York and developed songwriting and musical skills seemingly out of nowhere (we wonder when he jokes about selling his soul to the devil similar to the Robert Johnson stories). We see how he met his hero Woody Guthrie in the hospital, and contemporaries such as Joan Baez, Allen Ginsburg, and Pete Seeger as well as Dylan himself take us through this extremely infuential musical period, during which we are shown concert clips of a tumultuous 1966 electric concert in England. Scorsese utilizes mass amounts of stills and footage, and the result is a wonderful portrait of a complex songwriting legend.
