Maybe the most interesting thing about D.A. Pennebacker's extremely (yet not obviously) intimate portrait of Bob Dylan, filmed the moment he became larger-than-life is the mere fact that it's speaking for itself from the moment the oddball "'Subterranean Homesick Blues' card" sequence sets the mood, to the final seconds of Dylan and his brood leaving their final concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965. It's a documentary film, shot in that all-encompassing cinema 'protrude into your lives' verite style - but it completes exactly the opposite of what is apparent.

         While it's trying to pinpoint that moment when a poet becomes a star, when a singer becomes a legend and when a style becomes true art - it's really showing us what a chaotically intimidating individual Bob Dylan is. While it's selectively not editing it's sequences, just laying them on the table as randomly as it seems possible - it's really showing us the evolution of a supergiant : a man who starts out fuzzy with the vanity of fame and concludes in that picture-esque stage where he can criticize everything around him, including critique itself (that great scene where he goes on a 'I'm-in-the-beat-generation-and-I-can-be-as-contradictively-nutty-as-I-want' rampage with the Time Magazine reporter. That's a great example of the evolution of revered.)

         It's not always engaging. Like any concert film, you have to at least tolerate the artist (I'm a fan - but still, watching anyone perform live is just, to me, dry). Some of the concert moments are electric - some are simply dusty. It's a film that easily withstands the test of time and shows how timeless the pedastal of music is and how sometimes artists can be so utterly beautiful and clever, yet so opposing and cold all at the same time.

         Pennebacker's film has been called revolutionary, and yes, maybe half way through the film I could easily find the nerve to place it in the breakthrough bin. It is utterly entertaining to watch Pennebacker give three dimensions to a figure that, in the year two-thousand, we accept as a genius without need of evidence (though look to his latest album for just that); and it's wonderfully exciting to see the wrinkly, near unintelligible old man we know today in the heyday of his youth : smoking a heroic amount of cigarettes (the wrinkles) and speaking clearly, but still, sometimes, unintelligibly.