reserved for the JFK assassination and World War II.
Dylan’s shifting facades have fascinated fans for decades, and these movies attempt to find some form of truth about why he has so insistently captured our attention. Though “truth” is something Dylan—and some of the filmmakers—would surely laugh at. It’s as subjective as this list. With that in mind, let’s rank more than 50 years of documentaries about the, I don’t know, troubadour? Visionary? Charlatan? About Bob Dylan. . It’s a documentary about Dylan without much Dylan in it.
Fortunately, both missions succeeded to varying extents. Host Christopher Sykes interviews an adversarial Dylan, killing time between takes. “I’ve come through good times and bad times, you know,” he tells Sykes. “I’m not fooled by good times or bad times.” The musician-turned-actor offers non-answer after non-answer in an interview that shifts from playful jousting to clear-eyed confrontation and back again.
“When someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth,” Dylan says at one point. It sounds like something Dylan would say, not a cue that something is amiss. The line evokes Orson Welles’ devilish promise in the documentary: “During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true,” he says in his familiar baritone, opening a 90-minute movie that contains 30 minutes of bullshit. is a ruse.