If you don’t hop on the documentary’s signifying train, it doesn’t really matter. Meaning gathers anyway in “Rolling Thunder Revue,” which picks up ideas with each stop and song. At one point, Dylan and Ginsberg take a break to visit the grave of Jack Kerouac in Lowell, Mass. There, they reminisce, and Ginsberg reads from Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues,” which includes the following swirl:

Once I went to a movie

At midnight, 1940, Mice

and Men, the name of it,

The Red Block Boxcars

Rolling by (on the Screen)

Yessir

life

finally

gets

tired

of

living

Everything is in this scene: movies, life, death, friendship, the passing of trains, the passage of time.

“What attracts you, as a poet, to movies?” Ginsberg once asked Dylan. “To shift my consciousness somewhere,” Dylan said, “hopefully to a place that applies to my own personal experience.” It’s stirring how Dylan keeps coming back to film, with its beautiful masks and lies, and it is a gift that Scorsese has been there ready to meet him. Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch “Rolling Thunder Revue” is to understand what he meant.

scrimetime, have you seen this yet?