After the Crash: Bob Dylan 1966-’78
$19.95; MVD Visual

In the wake of Martin Scorsese’s magisterial Bob Dylan documentary for PBS, No Direction Home, comes this British DVD that takes up the thread of Dylan’s career where Scorsese left off.

No Direction Home followed Dylan from his childhood in Hibbing, Minn., to New York City, where he became not just a star, but “the voice of his generation,” an honorific he would have happily done without. Scorsese’s film ended with Dylan seeking refuge in upper New York state, only to suffer a motorcycle accident that would sideline him for a year, 1967, and prompt a re-evaluation of his creative trajectory.

After the Crash opens by suggesting that no one has ever known how seriously Dylan was injured; that the crash may have been a convenient bit of mythmaking concocted by an artist who was overwhelmed by the whirlwind of attention his music and performances had created.

That’s an interesting and not implausible conjecture. The problem is that it remains conjecture. Unlike No Direction Home, which had the peerless advantage of Bob Dylan’s firsthand cooperation, After the Crash is an arm’s length production, cobbled together by British Dylan wonks without the benefit of rights or inside information.

And so what we have here is a series of talking heads who know almost too much about Bob Dylan for their own good, going on at articulate length about the life of their hero. It feels a lot like a graduate seminar.

Interspersed with these recitations are a number of interviews with Dylan colleagues and hangers-on like Al Aronowitz, Scarlett Rivera, Jacques Levy, Rob Stoner and A.J. Weberman. Weberman, the self-proclaimed “garbologist” who stalked Dylan and scared the artist’s children when they found him rummaging through their trash, is an intriguingly candid, if misbegotten case. Also of interest are the recollections of Kevin Odegard, leader of the unlikely Minneapolis pickup band that would make a place for themselves in history by playing behind Dylan on his broken-hearted masterwork, Blood on the Tracks.

But where Scorsese, thanks to privileged access, can cut from someone talking about a particular song or performance to actual footage illustrating whatever point is being made, After the Crash is forced to fudge it, in effect humming a snatch of “Tangled Up in Blue” after Odegard recalls the transcendent experience of recording it.

Without access to Dylan himself or the music that he made, After the Crash is a kind of diehard’s exercise, barely scratching the surface of this complicated period in the life of one our most important artists.