RollingStone.com: Bob Dylan : Bob Dylan Looks Back

"Sitting through a three-and-a-half-hour documentary about an ex-boyfriend isn't most women's idea of fun. But Bob Dylan's early girlfriend Suze Rotolo says she enjoyed No Direction Home, the new Martin Scorsese-directed Dylan film that includes a rare on-camera interview with her. 'It was nice because the movie did not perpetuate that god myth,' says Rotolo, who inspired numerous Dylan songs and appears with him as a nineteen-year-old on the cover of 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. 'It wasn't a fan talking about someone they mythologize -- it was coming from everybody's own story.'



The film, which airs tonight and tomorrow night on PBS and is also available on DVD, combines unearthed archival footage and fresh interviews -- with the likes of Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger and Dylan himself -- to illuminate the first and most trailblazing part of Dylan's career, beginning with his Hibbing, Minnesota, childhood and ending with his 1966 Woodstock, New York, motorcycle accident. No Direction Home shows Dylan evolving at an unfathomable pace: In a span of just four years, he conquers the Greenwich Village folk scene, becomes the artistic voice of the civil-rights movement (Dylan is seen on the podium before Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I have a dream' speech) and then abandons it all to reinvent rock & roll with 'Like a Rolling Stone' and everything that followed. 'It's an artist at the absolute peak of his talent,' says Nigel Sinclair, one of the producers. 'The challenge was making a film worthy of the subject.'"