Rolling Thunder Revue review: Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan movie for Netflix blends fact, fiction, and stunning concert footage.

There’s never been and may never be a musician on whom more words have been exhausted in an attempt to explain What It All Means, but if the scribes who’ve devoted their lives and careers to poring over Bob Dylan’s every utterance had simply asked him themselves, they could have saved us all a lot of time. “It’s about nothing,” Dylan exclaims at the beginning of Rolling Thunder Revue, the Martin Scorsese documentary about his legendary 1975 to 1976 tour. Apart from Dylan, everyone who appears in Rolling Thunder Revue—which is subtitled “A Bob Dylan Story”—is credited as if they’re playing a part: Baez is “the Balladeer” and violinist Scarlet Rivera is “the Queen of Swords.” But some parts are more scripted than others. And while Sharon Stone is undoubtedly a real person, she wasn’t a teenage groupie whom Dylan hit on by pretending he’d written “Just Like a Woman” about her. Scorsese omits the most famous footage from the tour, a single-take close-up on Dylan’s face as he plays a solo version of “Tangled Up in Blue,” and in some of the songs that also appear in Renaldo & Clara, he chooses alternate angles that favor Dylan less and the group dynamic more.