Dylan doesn't need shades to hide behind anymore; he can hide behind his eyes, their hooded, shrewd look. His once-goofy humor is now so dry it's imperceptible; it lurks in a missed beat after saying that his first girlfriends “brought out the poet” in him or that he saw Joan Baez on TV and thought “she might need a singing partner”; it is cryptically or covertly or hermetically lewd. He loves leather now, sings its praises in “Highlands,” wears it even on 60 Minutes; it's the thick skin he needs to face the eternal realm of idiocy and a reminder to himself that he was young once, famous, a rock star even.

Dylan's rock stage persona is twitchy and vatic. He doesn't control his eyes for the camera and sometimes has to look down at his guitar. At best it could almost work as a kind of Framptonesque starchild pose. If they weren't his songs you might say he's butchering them but really he's trying to keep them alive through variation and rawness. He mostly ignores the audience, but I think he does it from shyness as much as contempt. Maybe he's trying to remember all the words. His face is skeptical, a paralyzed mask of fame like Warren Beatty's; he's met a lot of dangerous weirdos and can't afford to let down his guard.

The Dylan paradox is that despite the intensely personal nature of his songs you can never get a read on him as a person. This is partly because he isn't pretending to be your boyfriend or your buddy like everyone else on TV. In the context of people who telegraph their emotions and talk with their hands, you're either a salesman or an enigma. In Part One of Scorcese's documentary, there are only three real glimpses of him: when he is hanging out with his band and freaks out after getting a death threat, when he is leaving a concert and yells at the fans who booed him, and earlier when he plays Newport in 1963, surrounded by friends and seemingly happy.

Scorcese makes two decisions I can't sign off on. The first is that he tries to break Dylan down into influences and crams in too much social context (just as he did in the weak third act of Gangs of New York). We don't need to hear about the atom bomb and Lee Harvey Oswald tonight. The second is that instead of publicly canonizing Dylan as is his due, he sneakily tries to expose the nature of genius with the inclusion of unflattering details that suggest he was a pathological liar, he stole some records from a college friend, he was always supremely ambitious and given to manipulative mindgames. In the same vein we are given Baez's reductive claim that the apocalyptic-revolutionary hymn “When The Ship Comes In” was written in anger at a rude hotel clerk.

Biographers and critics are excluded from this republic, for better or worse. John Cohen of the revivalist New Lost City Ramblers provides some great commentary, as does Izzy Young, who ran the New York Folklore Center. Greil Marcus and Christopher Ricks are thanked with the interviewees in the credits but do not appear, so I assume they're holding hands on the cutting room floor.

Scorcese plugs Dylan into the same old story of a nobody's meteoric rise to fame. Perhaps no one can tell the real tale, the inner story of what he felt he wanted, what he did to get what he wanted, what he got and then how he felt about it after he got it. No one would believe it, no one's ears could even hear it.

Part Two focuses on Dylan dropping folk for “rock” (actually a kind of electrified honky-tonk country blues which he refines into something haunting and carnivalesque) and topical verse for “surrealism” (grotesque would be the more accurate term). He doesn't want to be a preacher with “twenty pounds of headlines stapled to his chest”; instead he chooses for a time to speak indirectly through images which are ugly and strange. (Or, as he would claim, to let such images speak through him.) The show's version of events collapses what was really a two-step process, first moving from protest to love songs and from the political back to the personal, and only then from the lucid to the mysterious and visionary.

The real context for Dylan is not music but literature, not these meshuggeneh Clancy Brothers or Pete Seeger, not Lou Reed and Neil Young, not the Gershwins or even Ginsberg and Kerouac, but Whitman and Yeats, whom he consistently approaches. Again and again we see people overcome merely quoting a favorite line from one of his songs.

Dylan's greatness and genius is intimately tied up with his lack of self and his anti-intellectuality. He describes one industry honcho, John Hammond, by saying he was “kind of like a Damon Runyon character--is that the word?” What word is he asking about, character? Past 60 he is still acting as if he only read books because there happened to be some in the houses of friends he crashed with.

But as the photos show he writes on a typewriter not a guitar. That's all the proof I need he's one of us.