Undoubtedly one of the oddest tours of all time — at least until the 1980s, that is — much of the Rolling Thunder Revue was seen in the 1978 Bob Dylan flick Renaldo and Clara. As watchable as that four-hour movie is to only the biggest of fans — and yes, I’m one of them — much of what was billed as a freewheelin’ variety show has been distilled to about two and a half hours here, thanks to director Martin Scorsese.

In Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, Marty recounts the Rolling Thunder tour with a music fan’s eye, while Dylan recounts the matter with the acerbic tongue of a wealthy dowager. We find Dylan back in the mid-’70s, driving the magical mystery tour bus on a musical journey across America and, I guess, Canada, leading his troupe of semi-professionals and hitting on a very young Sharon Stone in between all the musical interludes.

Clad in his shocking-white pancake makeup, the death mask of Dylan took to the smaller stages of many areas usually without such big concerts, oftentimes with singing stagehands and spiritual schlockers such as Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg and Joni Mitchell, mostly there to keep this train of tra-la-las a-rollin’.

Sure, it might seem like the kind of tragic thing that wouldn’t make it to the next town, but somehow Dylan and crew kept it going, which is especially triumphant considering he was spending far more than he made with each stop. Even though it wasn’t earning anything, the tour gained plenty of ground and earned Dylan plenty of fans. Still, in the end, this is a Scorsese flick and he manages to make a great documentary out of another man’s canister-rotting film. Besides, how else was anyone going to see it? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

I was smack dab in the middle of the so-called zine revolution, writing and publishing my work on an irregular basis. As a contributor to the scene, I was clinically obsessed with the trade publication of the amateur industry, Factsheet 5. It was there where I first learned about Mike Diana, the publisher of Boiled Angel, a badly drawn comic featuring some of the most socially deviant acts of satanic sex.

At the time, I thought he was an attention-seeking sociopath who, like many zinesters, was looking for that big break into the mainstream. And, after viewing this documentary, it looks as though, for the most part, I was right and he definitely got it.

Helmed by Basket Case auteur Frank Henenlotter, Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana tells the tale of a man and his zine, a grotty little manifesto that got him in trouble with Florida law, mostly for his cartoons of rotten cannibalism, hardcore sex and other acts of salacious storytelling.

While I would have (should have?) purchased it at the time and just forgotten about it, instead the trashiest state in the union decided to punish him for the immoral zine, causing him to become a hero in the eyes of those who independently published even lesser material. And I’ll admit it: I was one of them. While Diana is very much a troubled soul who should have been left by the wayside the way most zine publishers were, I guess the movement needed a hero and he was, whether he wanted to be, it.

Judging on what he was publishing, I guess it was somewhat worth it, although I don’t think he was mentally prepared for it. If I’m being honest, neither were any of the zinesters at the time, with most of us finally knowing the true story of Diana and Boiled Angel thanks to this documentary; as they say, knowing is half the battle. So while I can’t say Diana is a personal hero, to those of us doing zines, he was definitely on the far right — or is it left? — of the heroic scale. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.