Got there

Rating: 10/10 (7 January 2008)

I awaited this with great anticipation and a little trepidation, but the film is better than I or anyone could have hoped - certainly one of the films of the decade so far, and one of the best films ever made not merely about a rock star (there's not much competition there anyway!) but about an artist of any kind.
Six actors play versions of Dylan - some fantasy figures, others relatively accurate biographical portraits, others a mixture of gossip, myth and fanciful conjecture. The simple point to all of this is that Dylan is so complex a public persona that it would be reductive to reduce him to a single performance - he has given many performances in his time, and therefore Haynes' multi-casting is a perfect solution to a knotty problem.
I agree with most of the reviews that Cate Blanchet as Jude, the mid-60s acid queen Dylan, is a fantastic performance. I am in disagreement with the critics who dislike the Richard Gere sections, with this actor as a Dylan called Billy walking through a town of his own imagining called Riddle, which is where the extraordinary ordinary folk live and which is threatened by the corporate forces of that old man (Pat) Garrett. This section does an unbelievably sophisticated job of interweaving the meanings of both Dylan's involvement in Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (in which Dylan is Alias!!!) and the songs on Dylan and The Band's famous Basement Tape. The reading of the Basement Tape songs - as an apocalyptic vision of an America in its death throes - owes something to Greil Marcus' excellent Invisible Republic, and hats off to Haynes for recognising Marcus' book as one of the pre-eminent readings of Dylan's work. The Billy section features a deep and beautiful cover version of the Basement Tape song Going' To Acapulco by Jim James & Calexico, one of moments in the film which hit the emotional me square in the heart and drew tears to my eyes.
Delueze in Cinema 1 suggests that motion pictures are about showing us segments of change whilst suggesting a whole which is not present in the film but implied. Which makes I'm Not There the very essence of cinema...