To Capture Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, Martin Scorsese Had To Get Weird

Here's a thing you should know before watching Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, Martin Scorsese's new Netflix documentary about one of the most notorious rock tours in the genre's history: Bob Dylan is messing with you. Dylan has been messing with people since his first braggadocio days in Greenwich Village, when his made-up tales of wandering the Southwest with a circus helped convince his friends in the folk scene that he was the real proletarian deal. And he does it in this boisterous, confusing, highly enjoyable and slyly illuminating film, playing the role of the reluctant witness in Scorsese's search for a motive behind the tour that, in Dylan's own words, was not a success, and on his whole mid-1970s career.

"You only tell the truth when you're wearing a mask," Dylan quips in a new interview, providing Scorsese with framing language for his whole film. It's a line he's been working since he started doing interviews in the early '60s, a dominating principle of his artistic process, and a primary idea in the framing of his legacy through myriad musical compilations, books, boxed sets, and other archival efforts. In his own work and in subtle dialogue with people creating work about him, like the critic Greil Marcus and the filmmaker Todd Haynes, Dylan has secured