Renaldo and Clara is not a straight movie. It is a tortuous and uncompromising film, unlikely to appeal to anyone but those already captured by Bob Dylan's magic and susceptible to the many mythological references scattered throughout the 3 hours 52 minutes of its length. The portrait of the artist as a rock musician on the road … might at first appear self-indulgent and narcissistic, given that the epic was written and directed by Dylan himself. No other rock musician, after all, has ever dared present his audience with a similar self-portrait.

Dylan succeeds however, because he has refused, in characteristic style, to define himself: it is this mutability, the absence of a recognisable image, which makes the film and its ridiculously self-effacing hero (he hardly speaks at all) so absorbing. Dylan has always preferred expressing himself in song rather than press interviews, preferring ambiguity to interrogation. The structure of the...