"Down the Tracks: The Music that Influenced Bob Dylan," Eagle Media

Bob Dylan seems to bring the armchair scholar out of everyone.

In the latest derivative documentary on rock 'n' roll's unwilling crown prince, a half-dozen of them lead us down a very familiar path chock full of warmed-over insights into our most celebrated living musician.

There is no fresh material here. Dylan's influences have been obvious for more than 40 years. And while the uninitiated might find "Down the Tracks" helpful, anyone with even a thimbleful of Dylan knowledge will find this old news.

Dylan is an enigma, a chameleon and a trickster. Just when you think you've got him nailed down, he says or does something unexpected.

Pushing him into neat little boxes like "Down the Tracks" director Steve Gammond tries to do isn't worth the effort, and his attempt to liven things up with appearances by artists like The Handsome Family and Stacey Earle mostly fail.

Most irksome is a nearly complete lack of Dylan performances, footage or interviews. We get a few minutes of fuzzy images of home-video quality, but little else. And what little interesting footage there is of Dylan influences like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie McTell is often marred by voiceovers.

Anyone looking for keen insight on Dylan would be better off getting it from a documentary like "Don't Look Back" from the 1960s. Or even better, take home Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home," which features a cagey Dylan at his confounding and contradictory best.