Invisible Hits is a column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs, rarities, outtakes, and live clips.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself—or about finding anything,” Bob Dylan says in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, out this week on Netflix. “Life is about creating yourself.” For well over half a century, Dylan’s documentarians have been trying to capture that process in action. In many ways, their efforts are as essential to his myth as the music, even if these filmmakers often fail at fully decoding that myth. The very definition of a moving target, Dylan is impossible to pin down—after all, he’s the guy who boastingly sang “nothing is revealed” back in 1967. But these documentaries from over the decades reveal plenty. They follow in chronological order, based on the time period they portray.

The Other Side of the Mirror (2007)

Dylan was a mainstay at the annual Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island every summer from 1963 to 1965, starting as a Guthrie-esque protest singer and ending up a folk-rock enfant terrible. Murray Lerner’s The Other Side Of The Mirror expertly tracks this metamorphosis. First, we see Dylan in 1963, performing such socially conscious tunes as “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and earnestly leading a who’s-who of folk luminaries for a festival-closing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” One year later, he’s delivering a hallucinatory performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” And then, most famously, The Other Side of the Mirror presents Dylan’s 1965 “plugged-in” debut, which split the folk world in two. The absolutely ferocious rendition of “Maggie’s Farm” from that day remains a complete thrill, with Dylan barking out the words over Michael Bloomfield’s screaming guitar. (You can rent or buy this movie via iTunes.)

For a fuller picture of the Newport Folk Festival’s early days, check out Lerner’s 1967 film Festival, which features stellar performances by Mississippi John Hurt, the Staple Singers, Judy Collins, and many more.

Dont Look Back (1967)

A few months before Dylan went electric at Newport, he embarked on a sold-out tour of England. Documentarian D.A. Pennebaker tagged along for the ride. His resulting film, Dont Look Back, captures Bob playing solo acoustic to audiences whose reverence borders on the religious. Dylan, of course, is suspicious of such devotion, and Dont Look Back is highlighted by off-stage encounters with fans and press that are confrontational, to say the least. It’s a great fly-on-the-wall piece of documentary filmmaking, but it also works as a compelling drama. Using real-life situations and people (with the charismatic Dylan center stage), Pennebaker constructs a narrative as cohesive and complete as any fictional work. Added bonus: Dont Look Back famously kicks off with one of the great pre-MTV music videos, the much-imitated flip-card “Subterranean Homesick Blues” sequence. (You can rent or buy this movie via Amazon or iTunes.)

Eat the Document (1972)

Dylan hired Pennebaker again for his candle-burning-at-both-ends 1966 European tour with the Hawks, who were soon to morph into The Band. This time, Pennebaker and his crew were shooting in full color, fitting the more hallucinatory sounds of this era. Following the tour, Dylan rejected the rough edit Pennebaker delivered, titled Something Is Happening. Working in tandem with cameraman/editor Howard Alk, the songwriter used Pennebaker’s footage to make Eat The Document, a disjointed anti-documentary that has only been shown a handful of times and never been released on home video. Too bad. It’s not an easy watch by any means, but Eat The Document does feature plenty of incredible live clips and oddly beautiful cinematography, and offers valuable insight into Dylan’s amphetamine-frazzled mid-’60s psyche.

No Direction Home (2005)

Martin Scorsese made Pennebaker’s 1966 footage the connective tissue of his three-and-a-half-hour 2005 doc, No Direction Home, which traced Dylan’s rise from his Minnesota childhood to his NYC coffeehouse days to his electric period. The film’s coup was securing its ever-cagey subject’s participation—from a distance, at least, seeing as Dylan’s manager interviewed him, not Scorsese. In some surprisingly candid segments taped in the early 2000s, Dylan provides a clear-eyed—if still characteristically enigmatic—account of his earliest days, complemented by interviews with Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo, Pete Seeger, and many others. A necessary deep-dive into Dylan’s rise, No Direction Home is also packed with fantastic performances, from solo acoustic protest anthems to dangerously high-flying excursions with the Hawks. (You can rent this movie via Amazon or iTunes.)

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019)

The cameras were rolling constantly during Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the fall of 1975; apparently more than 90 hours of footage was shot. Dylan spent the next several years editing it all down into Renaldo & Clara, a sometimes fascinating, often incomprehensible four-hour flick that was savaged by critics upon release and has never been released in any home video format (it makes regular appearances on YouTube, however). Now, Martin Scorsese and co. have trawled through the original footage to make Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. The performances—most of them previously unseen—are exceptional. We see Bob and his band rehearsing in NYC; raging through a spellbinding “Isis,” Dylan sans guitar, eyes wild; crashing a Massachusetts mahjong parlor; playing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” at the Tuscarora Indian Reservation; and performing for a tiny group of inmates at Clinton State Prison in New Jersey.