A Dylan fan's perspective

Rating: 3/10 (5 December 2007)

Put simply, I'm Not There is a disappointment of a film. While the idea is brilliant--the six actor portrayal of one man, Dylan--it does not make up for the fact that the film has a pretty bad script. It seems to me the film acquired such talented actors solely based on the fact that they were offered an opportunity to play such an emblematic enigma. Haynes was correct assuming a traditional bio-pic treatment of Dylan's life would not capture the man himself and would have probably let down more fans than this film, but a little more coherence and storyline would have done this film a solid.
As for the Dylan references, I got them. I've read Chronicle and Scaduto's biography, I've listened to every album, bootlegs, Tarantula, etc. They were kind of too obvious. I felt like the lyric lines were really...stupid. I mean, after a woman smashed the glass vase on the head of a deranged hotel steward, Cate Blanchett's line "Just Like a Woman!"? Come on.
I think a film focusing only on the Heath Ledger/Charlotte Gainsbourg story would have been a much better movie and the Dylan story could have been contained within that frame. Had it been fleshed out, the naive youngster Dylan, the fledgling superstar Dylan, the pompous self-involved Dylan, the disillusioned Dylan, the retrospective Dylan, they could have all been seen in that one story and it would have been a whole hell of a lot more relatable.
Overall, it's worth seeing just to see Dylan's "life" as a movie, but I will always remember it as a disappointing experience. Hopefully, someday someone will take elements of this and a better script and make a better movie.