A complete liar: can you trust a word Bob Dylan says?
Many people might have seen 2024’s A Complete Unknown and come away from it thinking that Timothée Chalamet’s masterful turn as Bob Dylan must have been a fiction. The man on screen was just too slick, too inscrutable, too much of a charismatic little trickster to be real.
It’s a reasonable thought to ponder. Music biopics often are more about propagating the legend (read branding) of a famous rock star than anything to do with how they actually were in real life. What’s more, people might think they want the reality when really, they don’t. They just want to believe that the image they had in their head was real the whole time. Why do you think these biopics, the vast majority of them nothing more than exercises in brand control, make so much money? They give people what they want, from the music to the personalities.
A Complete Unknown could have been that. Sure, it presents its subject with less religious reverence than your average biopic. Going so far as to show that in Bob Dylan’s case, it wasn’t fame and fortune that brought the worst out of him; he was an insufferable prick from word go that just happened to be frighteningly talented. And didn’t he know it. That way with words, though, that sheer ability to always and forever be achingly, stand-offishly cool, surely that’s part of the fiction, right?
From what we know, probably not. Now, a part of this will come from how, as A Complete Unknown shows, you can’t trust Bob Dylan as far as you can throw him. You might be able to throw that twink pretty far, but that’s all part of the con in the end. He’s a consummate liar, but surely, there were moments when he didn’t just have the right words in mind? When he didn’t have the perfect witticism ready for the right time?
Surely he was as much a victim of L’esprit de l’escalier as the rest of us, right?
Nope, turns out Bob Dylan really is just wired like that.
Which makes sense. After all, he’s a consummate liar who arguably built his entire career on how to manipulate people and say just the right thing at the right time. It probably had as much, if not more, to do with his popularity than his actual music did, wonderful though it is. Beyond his music, where if you don’t have much time for his voice (and I don’t), you have to admire his songwriting, you can see this gift of the gab at work on countless occasions.
The only kind of bad interview the Dean of Dylanology gave was when he didn’t feel like talking. Even when he was in a mood and felt like pushing back against the poor soul tasked with getting a penny for his thoughts, he was a lights-out interview (some would say especially when he was in a mood). He’s also a wonderful writer of prose as well. For proof, look at the way he wrote about the song ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Eddie Arnold and Cindy Walker in his book The Philosophy of Modern Song.
“You’ve got a great yearning and a hunger: a mad crush on someone. But she doesn’t know you,” he writes. “How could she know you? How could she know your wild dreams, your fantasies, nightmares, and innermost thoughts? All the things you forbid her to know? It’s just not possible.”
He goes on to an even darker thought after this, saying “A serial killer would sing this song. The lyrics kind of point toward that” before finishing up by saying “this could totally be happening inside the guy’s head. At least until he picks up that knife. Then it’s the cold, hard facts of life.”
No matter where you look, there is all the evidence in the world to suggest that Dylan’s brain was firing on all cylinders basically all the time. As able to be compelling about an old folk song as he is composing a pithy take-down of ex-wife friends. What A Complete Unknown got entirely right was how exhausting it is to know someone like that, and Dylan himself was seemingly more exhausting and untrustworthy than anyone.