It will air in two parts, tonight and tomorrow night, on PBS. It sounds pretty good. Then again, the review is from the LA Times and the director is Martin Scorsese, so who knows. Link. Excerpt from LAT Review:
In the five-year span that the film concentrates on, Dylan plunged into the artistic ferment of the times and transformed himself from an average teenage folk singer into an underground hero and then arguably the dominant force in all of popular culture. He also hit the rapids of audience expectations and media pressure and turned from a baby-faced innocent into a twitching mess.
His path was twined with monumental social upheavals, and Scorsese's film – which came out on DVD last week and will air on PBS' "American Masters" series Monday and Tuesday – assembles vivid, visceral footage of the civil rights, free speech and antiwar activity that roiled America's streets and campuses. This "turbulent '60s" rubric is familiar fare, but it's essential to Dylan's art and career, and it propels this story like the rhythm section on "Subterranean Homesick Blues."
As far as Dylan himself goes, "Odyssean" might be the operative term. He says he was born "very far from where I was supposed to be," and he introduces the Homeric image himself: "I set out to find this home that I'd left a while back, and I couldn't remember where it was but I was on my way there." His story is framed as a voyage full of triumphs, temptations and perils. In the documentary's interviews, Dylan describes himself as a perpetual outsider and someone without a past, and he calls himself a "musical expeditionary" – a designation that he apparently felt gave him license to steal records from the home of musicologist and writer Paul Nelson, who recalls going to retrieve them accompanied by a large friend armed with a bowling pin.
Worth remembering: Thomas Merton was a huge Dylan fan.
Humorous to remember: When Jacques Maritain visited him, Merton insisted on playing Bob Dylan songs, hoping that Maritain would agree that Dylan is a genius. Maritain was frustrated that valuable time was spent on such a thing.
