You may not want to find 'home'

Let's be honest, there are few people in American history who have a better story to tell than Bob Dylan. For the greater part of a decade, Dylan seemed to have a toe in almost every social pool, and that chunk of time (early to mid-1960s) is the sole focus of Martin Scorsese's new DVD "No Direction Home." When you team up one of the greatest living storytellers with one of the greatest living stories, it's impossible not to get a hit.\nThe documentary travels from Robert Zimmerman's transformation into Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village to his arrival on the national scene. Commentary from Dylan and close friends, selections of live performances and a slew of negative responses to Dylan "plugging in" on his 1965 European Tour are injected into the story of Dylan's career.\nFor many, this movie is a must, but that's not to say it's perfect. For fans, you'll want more, and for casual Dylan listeners, you'll want much less (c'mon, it's 207 minutes of talking heads and folk music).\nThe diehard Dylan lover should take this DVD with a grain of salt. Scorsese has his name on the cover, but Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen co-produced the collection of clips and obviously contributed his own colors to how Dylan would be painted. \nScorsese/Rosen's frustrating "touch-and-go" happens all too much. One interview takes you into the hotel room where Dylan met the Beatles (one of the most important and influential moments in music history), but just as your interest is piqued as to what happened, the story is over. Along those same lines, Scorsese reads part of Dylan's acceptance speech to the Emergency Civil Liberties Union shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The selected part of the speech is powerful to say the least, but the film certainly doesn't touch the part of that speech where Dylan said he identified with Lee Harvey Oswald. \nBasically, the questionably commercialized "No Direction Home" weighs on the side of safety and casts Dylan as a "not-so-radical" radical. \nThere are thousands more words that could be written about this film -- about the understanding gained from seeing Dylan shy away from categorization and the labels the media tried to place on him, or about the beautiful imagery used in the film as both the beginning and end portray a man desperate to find himself; desperate to find his direction home. But much like "No Direction Home" doesn't have enough time to fully capture Bob Dylan, this review doesn't have enough space to fully capture "No Direction Home"