Don't Look Back . The Boston Phoenix . 03-23-98

Don't Look Back

DIRECTED BY: D.A. Pennebaker

REVIEWED: 03-23-98

Bob Dylan was 23 years old when D.A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, The War Room) accompanied him and his entourage on a 1965 tour of England and made this legendary, shaky, black-and-white, "home movie" vérité. It remains a revelation. The movie observes Bob Dylan at his most volatile -- creatively and personally -- as he was changing the face of pop music. Although he works the British tour as an acoustic solo act, he had already begun his move to electric rock (the now famous flash-card rendering of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a precursor to MTV, opens the movie). There's Dylan being bratty, taunting the press -- in one extended sequence he wails on a college newspaper correspondent, in another he reduces a Time magazine reporter to a sweating mess. He faces down upstart rival Donovan in a hotel room as the two trade songs. There are great filmed performances; there's a wonderful sequence with a teenage fan. And there's the Mother of All Deals, as we watch Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, work the phones with a slimy booking agent. Don't Look Back captures the artistic and commercial birth of modern rock.

--Jon Garelick

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