Ego Trip

By F. R.

RENALDO AND CLARA Directed and written by Bob Dylan

More than any other pop figure, Bob Dylan embodies the angry spirit of the '60s: his supercharged voice perfectly evokes the upheavals that defined an extraordinary decade in American life. For this reason -- and this reason only -- his new movie is not a complete waste of time.

When Dylan bursts into song in Renaldo and Clara, dozens of powerful memories come flooding back; a dreadful film becomes a resonant historical document. If its creator had any sense, Renaldo and Clara would be locked away in a time capsule somewhere, rather than exhibited in movie theaters.

The film's musical sequences were recorded during Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975-76 when he barnstormed the continent with other illustrious troubadours. Unfortunately, the concert foot age accounts for less than half of the movie's four-hour running time. The rest consists of improvised fictional scenes that are meant to impart Dylan's metaphysical view of the universe and himself -- though not necessarily in that order. Dylan plays a masked entertainer named Renaldo.

His then wife Sara plays a nonentity called Clara. Singers Ronnie Hawkins and Ronee Blakley appear as Bob and Sara, while Joan Baez traipses around as a mysterious "woman in white." Allen Ginsberg and Sam Shepard turn up in equally transparent disguises.

Nothing weighty emerges from these characters' random encounters. What the film does produce is an unflattering portrait of Bob Dylan's ego. Almost all the characters -- including the performers he elbows off-screen in the musical numbers -- treat the hero with dumb-struck reverence. Grateful Indians and blacks gleefully accept his political support. Worse still, Dylan fills Renaldo and Clara with self-deifying Christ images. At least we are spared a crucifixion scene.

By the time the movie is over, Dylan has amply demonstrated his contempt for a moviegoing audience. He borrows conceits from Bergman and Bunuel to show off his superficial knowledge of art-house movies. He strives for incoherence in the belief that pointless ambiguity can pass for an avant-garde aesthetic. He tries to arrive at dramatic truth by letting fuzzy conversations drag on interminably.

Andy Warhol made similar home movies more than a decade ago -- but he at least made them with a sense of humor.

If there are no laughs in Renaldo and Clara, there is some unintentional pathos.

By staging absurd improvisations with a straight face, Dylan demonstrates just how desperately he wants to hold on to the Woodstock ethos of the counterculture. But times have changed. Of all people , Dylan should know that .

F.R.

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