The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Gypsy Bob and doppleganger

Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is his best film since The Squid and the Whale. I prefer it to his more recent Marriage Story, a bit. Baumbach has always been at home among New York (mostly) Jewish intellectuals, but this film is his warmest and wisest to date. He usually elicits first class performances, but here he augments shots of Dustin Hoffman gamboling through Gotham with a visual lyricism only glimpsed briefly heretofore in the opening of Frances Ha.

Even if he had not been a master of fictional features, Martin Scorsese would go down in history as one of America's great documentarians. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan by Marin Scorsese continues his streak of first rate music documentaries. Scorsese has been criticized for injecting fictional characters into the mix, but this seems to me to be an apt way to tell the story of Gypsy Bob, the circus ringmaster of 1975 and 1976. Scorsese is playing with the notions of identities and masks of a performer, much as Dylan has done and Todd Haynes did in his portrait of the various Bobs in I'm Not There. "Bob Dylan", after all, is a construct, a stage name and one of many aliases. Scorsese honors Dylan the fabulist and Jokerman by printing the legend. Dylan knowingly plays a great cultural figure cutting loose and the supporting cast is rich and strange. I've never seen Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn have so much fun.