Don't Look Back

Starring: Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman, Bob Neuwirth, Joan Baez, Alan Price

Directed by: D.A. Pennebaker

RS: 4of 4 Stars

Filmed during Bob Dylan's tour of Britain in the spring of 1965, Don't Look Back -- now in a definitive two-disc edition -- is the first and best pop documentary of its kind, a defining study of celebrity as suffocation. It is a masterpiece of all-access portraiture, too, capturing a Dylan (not yet twenty-four) who is shy, wily and pissed off in rapid, unpredictable succession, yet also driven to create. In a hotel room, he pecks furiously at a typewriter as paramour Joan Baez sings his still-unfinished gem, "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word." In its grainy frankness and stretches of backstage banality, Don't Look Back is the anti-A Hard Day's Night, stripping away the fictionalized glamour of the Beatles' tour romp of a year earlier. As the tour proceeds, Dylan's manner darkens. At one point, he lets a reporter have it with both barrels: "I could tell you I'm not a folk singer and explain to you why, but you wouldn't really understand." D.A. Pennebaker then makes the point for Dylan in a brisk concert medley: quick edits of songs from the blunt apocalypse of "The Times They Are A-Changin' " to the complex fury of "Gates of Eden." "I just go out there and sing 'em," he tells a fan. In that way, Dylan has never changed.
DVD EXTRAS A disc of previously unseen outtakes including different musical performances, a cameo appearance by Nico and footage of Dylan playing the unreleased"I'll Keep It With Mine" on a piano backstage in London; two alternate versions of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" clip; commentary by Pennebaker and tour manager Bob Neuwirth; a reproduction of the 1968 paperback of the film's transcript.