Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown

Something Dylan always resisted making, The Other Side of the Mirror is a pure performance film. But it is also a three-act drama. In 1963, a 22-year-old lad turns up at Newport as a mysteriously accomplished folk revivalist. The movie opens during an afternoon workshop with solemn Bob performing his original iron-mining dirge, "North Country Blues," on a stage crowded with other folkies. Chanteuse Judy Collins stares fixedly into space; old time banjo-picker Roscoe Holcomb — himself a former coal miner — looks baffled. Not for the last time is somebody wondering: Who is this nasal-voiced kid, and where did he come from?

Later, a beaming Joan Baez introduces her protégé, and together they bellow Dylan's protest ballad "With God on Our Side." (Roscoe seems even more puzzled.) Lerner cuts to a nighttime version of the Dylan-Baez duet; someone declares that this curly-haired boy "has his finger on the pulse of our generation." Dylan does a total Woody Guthrie impersonation with "Talkin' World War III Blues" and then, switching from antiwar satire to civil-rights pathos, overwhelms the crowd with the complicated phrasing, credible analysis, and palpable emotion of his Medgar Evers-inspired "Only a Pawn in Their Game." The festival ends in a paroxysm of good feeling, with Dylan fronting a half-dozen performers singing his (or rather Peter, Paul and Mary's Top 40 hit) "Blowin' in the Wind." He's serious and modest, and he upstages them all.

In 1963, Dylan was a prodigy performing for a particular coterie. A year later, he is the festival's undeniable star, confident and no longer scruffy, with a repertoire of original songs — "Mr. Tambourine Man," "All I Want to Do," "Don't Think Twice" — so good that the audience seems to shake its collective head in disbelief. Had the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street really incubated so miraculous a talent? No longer is Dylan anybody's protégé; now Baez is his straight man, particularly when they sing their increasingly lugubrious anthem "With God on Our Side."

For his final number, Dylan introduces "Chimes of Freedom," declaiming it in a controlled beatnik ecstasy. It's his most complex song to date — and his most generous ever, a Whitmanesque embrace extended to "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe." The words keep spinning and tumbling; the sense of communion is overwhelming. Dylan delights in blowing the audience's mind. The crowd can't stop applauding. In a moment no one will ever see again, after a song he will soon cease to play, Bob pops back onstage to tell the fans that he loves them.

As the '65 festival begins, Dylan sports a fancier guitar and a better haircut. What's more, he's wearing shades and smoking his cigarettes onstage. It's clear that he's planning to run away from home. And the songs are even better! When he sings "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)," the audience still leans forward to concentrate. Then he appears in a polka-dot shirt and leather jacket, fronting the amplified Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and blows the audience away with the declaration that he ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. Scattered sullen boos. Dylan charges into his just-released Top 40 hit "Like a Rolling Stone." More boos.

In I'm Not There, Haynes envisions Newport '65 as a direct assault on the audience. The dandified Dylan and his band spray the crowd with machine-gun fire. Then, following the logic of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Haynes elects to "print the myth": He stages the apocryphal scene in which Pete Seeger has to be restrained from cutting the power supply with an ax. It's war!

In The Other Side of the Mirror, Dylan simply leaves the stage, but the crowd calls him back. Can't it please be the way that it was? Dylan returns alone and contemptuously sings them something they'll like: a polished, slightly rushed, and vaguely sarcastic version of "Mr. Tambourine Man." The audience begs for more. He leaves them with a hyper-enunciated rendition of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." End of story. Was ever a star more appreciated — or more stifled by that appreciation?

Haynes's protagonist first appears as an 11-year-old African-American (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails, hobnobbing with hobos, and calling himself Woody. Singing his Dust Bowl ballads and doted on by white Southern liberals, this plucky, pint-size vagabond is a hilariously self-aggrandizing, assured, voluble, and precocious performer, even if he has to be reminded that it's 1959. He's also a tough act to follow, but the mythmaking has only just begun.