I Tivo’d the first part of Scorsese’s Dylan bio on PBS and ended up watching it the next day just before Part II — the documentary equivalent, in length if not incoherence, of Dylan’s whacked out director’s cut of Renaldo & Clara. By the time it was over my hair had gotten kinda curly and my voice had become kind of nasal and I was droppin’ my g’s and sayin’ things like, “I’d like to empty the dishwasher but my hands are on fire.”

You ever get the feeling that, at least some of the time, Bob must be a real pain in the ass to be around? I know, I know — he’s Bob Dylan and he could be a major asshole all the time and get away with it if he had just written “Visions of Johanna” or “To Ramona” or “It’s Not Dark Yet” or about another hundred songs I could list (if not sing) at the drop of a Stetson hat. (My brother Ethan just sent me some samples from the new Rodney Crowell album, including a song called “Beautiful Despair” that opens with this couplet: “Beautiful despair is hearing Dylan drunk at 3 am/And knowing in a million years you’ll never write a song half as good as him.” And Rodney’s not alone.)

No, Dylan has the right to be as big a jerk as he wants and with the archival material at his disposal, Marty showed us just how much of a jerk he was — though as Davie Yaffee noted in his Slate review, this was an authorized biopic which left some of the rougher edges on the floor. The footage of him and the Band touring the UK in 1966 was taken from DA Pennebaker’s Eat the Document. It’s supposed to be unavailable but you can find a copy at Kim’s Video on St. Marks and probably about a hundred other places around the country. In it you will see the same funny scene Scorsese included of Dylan riffing off some sign outside an apothecary’s, making nonsense poetry out of the words — “I need someone to bathe my bird, knit my soul…” What you don’t see is Dylan and Richard Manuel, on the same early morning stoned stroll offering some starstruck fan a leather jacket for his girlfriend. Haha. That Bob.

You did see Joan Baez vent, all those years after the fact, about following Bob around on another UK tour, the one documented in Don’t Look Back, and never being asked to join him on stage. After all she had done for him! An unseen interviewer asked Dylan about it and for a moment he looked authentically embarrassed, human as all of us. “It’s hard to be wise and in love at the same time,” he finally says and I say give the man a cigar. Or something stronger. As he demonstrated in the remarkable first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan has been far more self aware all these years than his critics have given him credit for. If he didn’t choose to let this film be a Bob bashing session, can you really blame him? And would you want to be on the other side of a pissing contest with Dylan, anyway? The master if the fuck-you song — “Positively Fourth Street,” “Idiot Wind,” et al — Bob has proven he can take it and dish it out. Even at 3 AM.