The finest American film of the 21st century

Rating: 10/10 (9 November 2007)

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There is a genuinely visionary work of art; ostensibly a biopic of Bob Dylan, Haynes has actually made seven different short movies, each with its own precise cinematic language, which have then been carefully interwoven to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I won't bother rehashing the film's central conceit and plot, which have been extensively commented on elsewhere. I will say that the misguided reviewers who praise the Cate Blanchett portion of the movie above the others (wonderful though her performance is) are missing Haynes' point entirely. Each of the different segments of I'm Not There inform and comment on each other in ways that are sometimes direct and sometimes oblique but there is ALWAYS a logic to the overall structure.
For someone to say that they would have preferred a movie entirely about Blanchett as Dylan is tantamount to saying that they would have preferred a more traditional Dylan biopic in the manner of Ray or Walk the Line. This traditional biopic formula is precisely what Haynes is trying to explode and the Richard Gere segment of the film (the most critically maligned portion of the movie by far) is where he succeeds in his strategy the most!
Despite what many critics have written, it is not Christian Bale as the born-again Dylan who portrays the oldest incarnation of the Dylan character. It's Richard Gere as Billy the Kid. What Haynes seems to be saying is that Billy the Kid should have been gunned down in his youth by Patt Garrett but has miraculously lived to grow old - just as Dylan should have died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 yet is still on tour today at age 66. (Viewed in this light, each of the younger versions of Dylan can be seen as the memories of Gere's Dylan-as-aging- outlaw.) While it is true that Gere's segment also has ties to the "Basement Tapes"-era Dylan, the fact that Billy is also supposed to represent Dylan in the 21st century is crucial. Without this understanding, the interaction between Billy the Kid and Woody Guthrie (the completion of a circle of life) makes no sense. No wonder critics are flummoxed at the Gere portion of the movie!
This is the kind of film that makes you grateful to be living in the present, when a genuinely daring and extremely talented filmmaker like Haynes can use the resources of Hollywood and bend them to his will to create something that is at once experimental, radical, challenging, funny, moving and, yes, finally, liberating. I'm Not There leaves the rest of contemporary American cinema in the dust.