Bob Dylan finds himself, his voice and his way in new PBS documentary

"You can go anywhere when you're somebody else," says folk singer Mark Spoelstra, in the magnificent new "American Masters" documentary, "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home," airing on PBS at 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday (KCTS).

Spoelstra is describing the eerie way the ever-elusive Dylan seemed to inhabit other people — inventing himself as he went along — in his formative years.

Directed by Martin Scorsese and told in two two-hour segments, "No Direction Home" sets out to unmask the inscrutable singer/songwriter, taking on his odyssey from 1961 to 1966, when he became the most important figure in American popular music.

And while the film doesn't answer all of the lingering questions about Dylan, it digs deeper than any other work about this complex, visionary poet and is absolutely riveting to watch.

Part of the attraction of "No Direction Home" is the new looks it offers at this oft-examined figure, through rare archival footage from Murray Lerner's film, "Festival," outtakes from "Don't Look Back," stills from private collections, even a home movie made in Greenwich Village.

But it's the quality of the interviews with people such as Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Dylan's old girlfriend Suze Rotolo, folk-singers Dave Van Ronk, John Cohen, Spoelstra and others that are extraordinary. Unlike so many documentaries, featuring vacuous talking heads speculating about events they never experienced, these are smart people who actually were there, and who have something to say.

And then there is Dylan himself, whom the camera keeps cutting back to, his grizzled face filling half the screen, eyes revealed — sometimes direct and straightforward, at others, evasive and darting — speaking in those low, lockjaw tones and seeming to want to explain himself, once and for all — or at least do the best he can.

Dylan was born in 1942 in the mining town of Hibbing, Minn. He worked as a teenager in rock bands (including a few gigs with Bobby Vee), switched to acoustic guitar on the Minneapolis college folk scene, then went to New York. There, he befriended his idol, Woody Guthrie, and — in two short months — found his poetic voice.

Dylan is eloquent when it comes to explaining his aesthetic.

"It was the sound that got to me," he says, recalling the first records he heard by Gene Vincent, Webb Pierce, Muddy Waters, Roy Orbison and Johnnie Ray, "who had a strange incantation to his voice." Those far-away, mysterious sounds, Dylan recalls, "made me feel like I was somebody else, that I was not even born to the right parents or something."

This quote cuts to the central question about Dylan — identity. Who is this guy, who changes his name from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, who for a while tells people he is Bobby Vee, then concocts a bio sheet in New York that says he grew up in New Mexico and ran away with the circus?

"Chronicles," Dylan's recent autobiography, deals better than the film with the name change (borrowed from poet Dylan Thomas), but "No Direction Home" offers a full spectrum of views about how Dylan created his new self.

Like a sponge, the geeky, skinny folk singer soaks up everything, copying (and stealing) anything in sight, from Guthrie's topical-song form and Van Ronk's chord changes to Allen Ginsberg's surrealism and Charlie Chaplin's wit.

The film makes it clear Dylan knew just how original he really was.

"There were many singers who were good," he reflects on his formative days in the Village. "But they couldn't get inside anybody's head. You've got to be able to pin somebody down."

"No Direction Home" is especially good on the commercial realities of the day, including the major influence of John Hammond, who brought Dylan to Columbia Records; Albert Grossman, who became Dylan's manager; and publisher Artie Mogull, who gave "Blowin' in the Wind" to Grossman's calculatedly commercial act, Peter, Paul and Mary.

As for the other big issue in his career — the famous break with politics and "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival — while Dylan may protest that he was "never" a topical folk-song writer and that he "never struggled for popularity," the film shows otherwise.

Dylan was not only ambitious for fame, his friends say in those early days he "wanted to change the world." The film goes back again and again to scenes of Dylan getting booed by outraged folkies on his tour of England.

Was he an opportunist? His girlfriend, Rotolo, stops short of calling him a "hustler" but says he definitely knew a good opportunity when he saw one. Dylan himself, as in his book, just gets defensive about the whole subject. One fascinating detail that comes up, however, is that the infamous Newport concert featured only 15 minutes of electric music! What a mighty quarter-hour it was.

Anyone who grew up listening to Dylan will choke up watching black and white footage of the baby-faced, sky-gazing singer crooning "Blowin' in the Wind" at Town Hall in 1963, or "Chimes of Freedom," "One Too Many Mornings," "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Like a Rolling Stone."

But Scorsese's concise, dramatic direction makes this more than a compendium of rare footage. This is a film about an artist discovering himself — an Odyssean return to that "home" Dylan discovered in those early records. In the process, he told us something about ourselves.

As the Irish folk singer Liam Clancy says, Dylan "articulated what the rest of us wanted to say — but couldn't."

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com

Correction: Information in this article, originally published September 23, was corrected September 27. In a previous version of this story, Bob Dylan's birthplace and date were given as Hibbing, Minn., in 1942. In fact, Dylan was born in Duluth, Minn., in 1941 and raised in Hibbing.