A near-total disaster

Rating: 2/10 (15 November 2009)

Oh we must be truly sated indeed with the standard-issue biopicture, with its patented and trademarked rise to glory and fall into drugged ignominy with phoenix-like rebirth, to accept a sorry film like this as some kind of precious alternative. This is a film that promises to tell us something about Bob Dylan, but instead presents a semi-impressionistic series of unrelated images that are supposed to represent various facets of Dylan's personality and public image. What we end up with is probably the most indulgent rock film since Roger Waters' "The Wall." Along the way, a pair of fine performances by Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett are used as grist for the mill. When Blanchett is on screen, we want to watch, but she doesn't tell us anything either because she's acting out the most enigmatic portion of Dylan's life. On the other end of the extreme there are these laughably nonsensical scenes with Richard Gere riding around on a horse surrounded by images taken from Dylan's more obtuse lyrics. And Christian Bale's performance here is a laugh-out-loud mistake. It's surely a very beefy and well-fed Dylan we're looking at there.
You've got a director who wants to be the equal of Antonioni, and he has indeed succeeded in making a very superficial movie about the superficial. So I'd give him credit there -- his film is just as pointless to look at today as most of the "art" films of the 60s and 70s are. Basically all the weight of all this artistry and technology is being put to task on Dylan, a man who in and of himself would be of little interest if it weren't for his music.
Some of the most interesting ideas in the movie come out of the least effective scenes. For example, the idea of portraying some version of Dylan as a little black child is a disarming symbol -- is it supposed to tell us about how Dylan once saw himself, as a new Woody Guthrie, or about how the public wanted to see him? As he sits on a porch and sings "the blues" with a pair of rather typical Hollywood country black folk, the music emerges with studio clarity. The words ring out, "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken!", and no words like these were ever heard on a back porch in the South. Is this a statement on how in our quest for authenticity, we accept the post-modern as the authentic tradition? Or is it simply trying to pass off the young Dylan as an authentic folk voice? Ultimately it doesn't matter because the scene itself is so cloying and annoyingly slick.
Basically, you have to care a whole lot about Bob Dylan as a person, you have to think he's some kind of mythical personality, to accept this movie. If you don't think Bob Dylan is all that important, then you're going to wish you had these few hours of your life back. They would be much better spent watching "Don't Look Back" or "Hard Rain", to see the real Dylan doing the things that actually made him famous and popular. The man was an entertainer, not a prophet. The film seem to want more than anything to make exactly this point -- and yet it drapes the man and itself as cinema in so much deliberate obscurity that clearly in the film's heart it wants to hold onto the mystique more than it wants to open up any truth for us.