Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it isLet's get one thing out of the way: yes, Cate Blanchett is marvelous as Electric Dylan, capturing his carefully cultivated aura as a churlish trickster, less interested in answering questions than pointing out the sheer absurdity of asking them in the first place. The setting isn't always note perfect - it might have been more appropriate to show Dylan's audience at Newport machine gunning him rather than the other way around, given his well-documented mystification at the sheer vituperativeness of their response to his abandonment of folk's regimented austerity for the immediacy of rock and roll. Yet Blanchett plays "Jude Quinn" note-perfect - Dylan is never mentioned by name in I'm Not There - as someone who has turned the corner and found nothing but a dead end: fitting, as writer-director Todd Haynes' treats the famous motorcycle crash that sidelined Dylan for a year and a half in '67 and '68 as a terminus for the artist's myth, instead of a convenient bi-section of his biography.
Five other actors play facets of Dylan in the film: Marcus Carl Franklin, a young black boy, plays Dylan the fabulist, going by the name "Woody Guthrie", manufacturer of his own myth and one step ahead of his unremarkable suburban middle class roots; Ben Wishaw is "Arthur Rimbaud", Dylan-as-poet, serving as a cryptic narrator of the proceedings; Christian Bale is both the Village-era folky and post-divorce born again Dylans, "Jack Rollins" and "Pastor John" respectively; Richard Gere is the Basement Tapes-era recluse, steeped in the the old, weird America, and retreating from his own notoriety - named "Billy the Kid," a reference to Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which Dylan both recorded the soundtrack and appeared in. Beside Blanchett, though, the best thing here is the underheralded Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark," a simulacrum of Dylan circa Blood on the Tracks, an acerbic and embittered presence whose marriage is collapsing. His performance confirms the idea of Dylan as complete enigma, even to those closest to him: a point effectively driven home by Haynes' decision to make Clark an actor whose most famous role was Bale's version of Dylan.
I'm Not There is not an explanation of Dylan's myth, nor even a celebration, really; rather it's something of an addition to it. This makes sense: Dylan, who has really never been one to demystify himself, implicitly sanctioned the film, granting Haynes' the right to use his music after reading a treatment. I'm Not There is part and parcel of Dylan's recent campaign to frame his legacy, a spiritual twin to Martin Scorsese's 2006 documentary, No Direction Home, which tracked his initial rise to fame and his subsequent electrification. But whereas Scorsese's film is the actual record, what really happened, Haynes' movie is about the perception, the public's fun house view of the man. It is exactly what the title implies: an acknowledgment that "the many lives of Bob Dylan" are our creation just as much as they are his - a product of our need to mine his words and actions for a deeper emotional truth. What is the phrase "emotional truth" after all, if not a recognition that what we're actually after is a lie?
One thing that does not elude, though, is Dylan's music. Whether from his own mouth or via an interpreter, it resounds throughout the film, undergirding even the most pretentious of Haynes' postmodern flights of fancy. "I Want You" scores Ledger's Dylan making love to his future wife (wonderfully played by French actress/singer Charlotte Gainsbourg - incidentally, the only non-Dylan character whose presence in the film registers), Stephen Malkmus' reading of "Ballad of a Thin Man" backs a hallucinatory music hall sequence, Marcus Carl Franklin jams out a version of the "Tombstone Blues" on a porch. The songs are the one place in the film that Dylan is, proof that even a hall of mirrors as exquisite as Haynes' only works because of the subject it reflects.
Five other actors play facets of Dylan in the film: Marcus Carl Franklin, a young black boy, plays Dylan the fabulist, going by the name "Woody Guthrie", manufacturer of his own myth and one step ahead of his unremarkable suburban middle class roots; Ben Wishaw is "Arthur Rimbaud", Dylan-as-poet, serving as a cryptic narrator of the proceedings; Christian Bale is both the Village-era folky and post-divorce born again Dylans, "Jack Rollins" and "Pastor John" respectively; Richard Gere is the Basement Tapes-era recluse, steeped in the the old, weird America, and retreating from his own notoriety - named "Billy the Kid," a reference to Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which Dylan both recorded the soundtrack and appeared in. Beside Blanchett, though, the best thing here is the underheralded Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark," a simulacrum of Dylan circa Blood on the Tracks, an acerbic and embittered presence whose marriage is collapsing. His performance confirms the idea of Dylan as complete enigma, even to those closest to him: a point effectively driven home by Haynes' decision to make Clark an actor whose most famous role was Bale's version of Dylan.
I'm Not There is not an explanation of Dylan's myth, nor even a celebration, really; rather it's something of an addition to it. This makes sense: Dylan, who has really never been one to demystify himself, implicitly sanctioned the film, granting Haynes' the right to use his music after reading a treatment. I'm Not There is part and parcel of Dylan's recent campaign to frame his legacy, a spiritual twin to Martin Scorsese's 2006 documentary, No Direction Home, which tracked his initial rise to fame and his subsequent electrification. But whereas Scorsese's film is the actual record, what really happened, Haynes' movie is about the perception, the public's fun house view of the man. It is exactly what the title implies: an acknowledgment that "the many lives of Bob Dylan" are our creation just as much as they are his - a product of our need to mine his words and actions for a deeper emotional truth. What is the phrase "emotional truth" after all, if not a recognition that what we're actually after is a lie?
One thing that does not elude, though, is Dylan's music. Whether from his own mouth or via an interpreter, it resounds throughout the film, undergirding even the most pretentious of Haynes' postmodern flights of fancy. "I Want You" scores Ledger's Dylan making love to his future wife (wonderfully played by French actress/singer Charlotte Gainsbourg - incidentally, the only non-Dylan character whose presence in the film registers), Stephen Malkmus' reading of "Ballad of a Thin Man" backs a hallucinatory music hall sequence, Marcus Carl Franklin jams out a version of the "Tombstone Blues" on a porch. The songs are the one place in the film that Dylan is, proof that even a hall of mirrors as exquisite as Haynes' only works because of the subject it reflects.
