The Cinema of Rock: Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born…Again! (3/5)

Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born…Again!
dir. Joel Gilbert
Featuring: Bob Dylan, Jerry Wexler, Pastor Bill Dwyer, Joel Selvin, Spooner Oldham, Regina McCrary, Pete Howard

Official Website
Release Date: Oct. 28, 2008
Released by: Highway 61 Entertainment

F10 Rating:

Director Joel Gilbert’s ode to Bob Dylan’s largely underrated “Jesus Years” is a warm love letter from a Dylan enthusiast that is crying out to understand a period of Dylan’s career (which is generally a dangerous endeavor) and simultaneously trying to legitimize what is widely seen as his least interesting period. Gilbert’s documentary is a long ways from Scorsese’s thoughtful No Direction Home, or D.A. Pennebaker’s masterpiece Don’t Look Back, or even Todd Haynes I’m Not There for that matter.

Gilbert is a true Dylan fanatic. This is his fourth documentary on Dylan, he fronts a Dylan cover band called Highway 61 Revisited, and his production company (he has done one documentary not focused on Dylan) is called Highway 61 Entertainment. He looks like Dylan, he walks like Dylan, he is the kind of guy who I would trust if he started raving about Dylan to me over a glass of whiskey at an empty bar on an anonymous highway in the Midwest.

Unfortunately, sheer enthusiasm for one of the most legendary American musicians in history is not enough to make a compelling film. The film is filled with talking heads, and some oddly juxtaposed images in the midst of the interviews that otherwise lack an aesthetic principal. If the film would have acknowledged that it was simply going to be a series of interviews and a lo-fi look into a period of Dylan’s life, that would be one thing, but the relentless angle shifts and inversions during interviews, flipping from color to black and white, and other odd cinematic tricks make the interviews a jarring and discontinuous.

There is a lack of authoritative figures from this period of Dylan’s life speaking in the film, but the interviewees who were chosen are interesting. What it lacks is anyone who was close to Dylan during this time, but then again, who has ever been that close to Dylan, that’s part of the mystery and intrigue of his personage. The olio of people who were involved in Dylan’s life at this time, or who came into contact with him only because of his conversion to Christianity is an interesting (if not purely speculative) approach to dissecting this period. While it does not have the all star cast from Dylan’s past like No Direction Home, it does make the most of what it has going, and manages to take an engaging angle. Among the interviewees are Pastor Bill Dwyer who was Dylan’s first pastor during his initial transition to Christianity, legendary producer Jerry Wexler is certainly the highlight of the film, he produced both <em>Slow Train Coming</em> and the less interesting <em>Saved</em>, rock journalists Joel Selvin and Pete Howard weigh in on the experience of being huge Dylan fans and rock journalists during the late 70s and seeing Dylan’s sudden transformation, and a few minor members of Dylan’s band at that time (background singer Regina McCrary is also a member of Gilbert’s Highway 61 Revisited) round out the selection of experts to which Gilbert puts the questions. The string of interviews, though disjointed, and lacking of a theoretical trajectory, makes for a unique study in Dylanology.

Nonetheless, the film spends too long lingering on religion itself instead of prying into the transformative process for Dylan. Interviews with Dwyer and Jews for Jesus founder Mitch Glaser play a heavy role in the first act of the film, and leave the emphasis on what it means to be “reborn” and how a person of Jewish descent makes the transition to Christianity without actually applying these ideas to the person of Dylan outside of scattered anecdotes. These would be great touchstones if the film returned to them in a meaningful way, applying them to Dylan through his music. But the film never digs that deep into Dylan’s conversion.

In fact Dylan is notoriously missing from the film. There is a brief snippet from an interview with Dylan during this period and a couple of audio tracks of him speaking about Jesus at a concert. Otherwise the film lacks any input from Dylan himself or source material. It doesn’t even take the time to explore the lyrics from albums like Slow Train Coming (except for a brief point when they elaborate on how Dylan understood Christianity very quickly and how “Gotta Serve Somebody” exemplifies that understanding). Even Dylan’s music is missing from the film. The large majority of the music in the film is actually Gilbert’s Highway 61 Revisited covering songs from this period, which are good covers, but seem like an odd directorial decision in the end.

I don’t want to give the impression that this film is not worthwhile. It’s truly about time a filmmaker tried to legitimize this period of Dylan’s career. Thematic content aside, Slow Train Coming is one of Dylan’s best albums, it marks another transition in his career which led to the brilliant discs of his late career like Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. Gilbert is a rare kind of director, a passionate indie director who has managed to break though the smoke screen and get low budget films seen and heard. There are far too many Dylan documentaries for this to become a classic, but it is certainly the best documentary that attempts to take on the much storied, argued about, derided, and praised “Jesus Years”.