TOM PETTY – BIGGING UP A DREAM

After more than thirty years in the music business, I don’t begrudge Tom Petty the right to an epic documentary charting his career.

I would, however, challenge the implicit presumption that he is as important a figure as Bob Dylan or George Harrison, both of whom have been subject to similar films directed by Martin Scorsese.

Those movies, No Direction Home and Living In The Material World, lasted 208 minutes which Peter Bogdanovich trumps by thirty minutes.

As any reconstructed male will tell you, size isn’t everything and there is no good reason why Running Down A Dream should be so long. The story of the Heartbreakers’ roots as Mudcrutch and how the bond between musicians has remained so strong could have been told in half the time and would have made a much slicker and more interesting film portrait.