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I'm Not There

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

I know very little about Bob Dylan. I've listened to "Like a Rolling Stone" my fair share of times, sure, and my eighth grade English teacher tried valiantly to get my class to understand his love of "Blowing in the Wind," but beyond that I really have no sense of history about the guy. Didn't Hayden Christensen play him last year in Factory Girl or something?

If my ignorance sounds relatable to your own situation, you're in for a rough time if you go see Todd Haynes's new film I'm Not There. A super-artsy biopic of Dylan, you've probably heard the film's creative conceit: it stars six actors who all play different versions of the singer - a group that includes a woman, Cate Blanchett, and a young African-American boy, Marcus Carl Franklin.

I really don't mean to be dismissive here, but the film did very little for me as a whole. Clearly, this is Haynes's love letter to the man, the myth, the legend, etc., and it's a display of downright idolatry. But if you've heard the director quoted as saying you don't need to be familiar with Dylan to watch this movie...he's lying.

Each actor plays Dylan - or some form of him; they all have different names, which serves to further confuse the issue - in a different fashion; for example, all of Blanchett's segments are about Dylan under the floodlights of fame, and all of Heath Ledger's segments chronicle his troubled home life. Richard Gere shows up in an odd Western segment as an older Dylan living in seclusion; Marcus Carl Franklin calls himself Woody Guthrie has a lot of conversations with people on trains; Christian Bale mumbles a lot and becomes a born-again Christian; and finally, Ben Wishaw isn't given anything to do at all except say a few lines in a direct-address to the camera.

The performances range from unsure (Gere) to charming (Franklin) to really interesting (Blanchett). The very structure of the movie requires that each of the six Dylans be one-dimensional, and only Blanchett, who's given the most screen time, seems able to inject more into her performance than what was on the page. She's a lock for a Supporting Actress nomination, and hey, anybody who can go from Queen Elizabeth to Bob Dylan deserves it.

This is a well-made film, let there be no doubt; Haynes is a more than capable filmmaker (see his beautiful Far From Heaven), and here we get enough cool lighting tricks and black-and-white segments and A Hard Day's Night homages to make any film student shoot their wad. A musical/dream/fantasy sequence with Blanchett and Bruce Greenwood as a probing critic (with a flawless British accent) is especially impressive visually, although like most of the film I had no idea what it was supposed to mean.

Given my ...