I wish I hadn't been there.

Rating: 3/10 (3 December 2007)

Even when I had only heard of the idea of having 6 different actors in a movie playing different personalities of Bob Dylan, I thought it was stupid. Then I kind of got convinced otherwise by the names in the cast and the promising trailer. Having seen "I'm Not There." now, I know that my initial notion was right. This movie is nothing but pretentious, self-indulgent crap.
Bob Dylan's best music always works on two levels: you can enjoy it just for sounding great or you can really dig into it and figure out the true meaning of the author's poetry. "I'm Not There" doesn't work on that first level. It's not enjoyable at all, if you're not familiar with Dylan's biography (and I wonder if it was different if I were). All those great actors (and actresses) are wasted here. I actually found Cate Blanchett to be the most annoying. She embodied everything that people who don't really understand Dylan make him out to be: an incomprehensible nerd, that always blabbers seemingly senseless BS about himself or his art that people don't really understand but think of as the revelation of modern poetry. Ben Whishaw's part was similarly dispensable.
It was hard to tell what the deal with the other Dylan impersonators (Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Marcus Carl Franklin) was. There was no apparent connection between them, and the individual story lines really weren't that interesting at all. The main offender was Richard Gere's part, though: an aging Billy the Kid who stumbles through the movie as if he thought he was on the set of "Young Guns III". Seriously, every time he came on, there was giggling in the audience, his character is that out of place.
Well, after a while I had to struggle to stay awake. I really expected much, much more from this, at least something, anything, but this movie was just one big nothing. The word "pretentious" has been invented for this mess. Dylan must be really disgruntled that it's once again The Beatles who got the entertaining movie ("Across The Universe"), while the one about him will only attract geeks who spend too much time listening to "Time Out Of Mind".