Flawed But Periodically Compelling Collage of Dylan Makes for a Murky Character Study

Rating: 5/10 (13 May 2008)

I wish I was better prepared to accept the sheer audacity of Todd Haynes' wildly imagined take on Bob Dylan's life and legend because this 2007 film requires a certain mindset to accept a fragmented story thread that tethers together six disparate evocations of his persona. The conceit is that none of the personalities look remotely like him or have his name, which I believe is Haynes' main point, that Dylan is an enigmatic figure open to anyone's interpretation of who they think he is. Part of the frustration in watching the film is realizing that we don't know that much more about Dylan by the end. Most of the references to his checkered career in the screenplay co-written by Haynes and Oren Moverman will likely go past most viewers, even though many of the lines are direct quotes from Dylan. That's the most significant flaw of the approach taken here, that we are familiar enough with his life to make sense of the story being told.
At the outset, we see Dylan as a black eleven-year-old who hops boxcars, writes folk songs as if he was living during the Great Depression, and goes by the name Woody Guthrie after his hero. Luckily, the precocious Marcus Carl Franklin is terrifically winning in the part. The second incarnation is Jack Rollins, a young 1960's-era folk singer with a political conscience played compellingly by Christian Bale. Julianne Moore, the star of Haynes' 2002 Douglas Sirk tribute, "Far from Heaven", shows up in documentary-like footage being interviewed as a Joan Baez doppelganger. Bale also shows up later as Pastor John singing gospel songs reflecting Dylan's born-again conversion in 1979. With sometimes merciless bravado, Heath Ledger plays Robbie Clark, a Method-style Hollywood actor whose most acclaimed performance is of Rollins in a biopic. He gets married to a French girl, played affectingly by Charlotte Gainsborough, whom he eventually alienates with his obsessive, chauvinistic behavior.
The most talked-about Dylan persona is embodied by Cate Blanchett, physically transformed into Jude Quinn, the male singer who achieves the pinnacle of his success in the mid-1960's only to face harsh criticism for going electric with his music. Looking more like a morosely arrogant k.d. lang, the actress gives a convincingly unapologetic performance as the drug-addicted musician whose media sound-bites were becoming a cynical series of non-sequiturs meant to make fools of the press. In the film's weakest passages, a rather somnambulant Richard Gere plays the latter-day Dylan as Billy the Kid in a surreal, San Peckinpah-influenced world set in the tense western town of Riddle. British actor Ben Whishaw rounds out the Dylan parade in a few faux-interviews as Arthur Rimbaud, a young rebel named after the tortured poet. To emphasize the differences among the Dylan interpretations, Haynes uses different film stock and narrative styles to tell the stories and then further convolutes matters by scrambling the disjointed fragments into a nearly random collage. Dylan's music is used throughout, sometimes as background, other times by contemporary performers lip-synched by the actors. His voice is an almost ghostly presence until he finally shows up playing his harmonica in 1960's-era documentary footage at the end.
Part of me is genuinely impressed with Haynes' experimental-feeling narrative and how his film is imbued with an adventurous spirit that doesn't hold much concern for an audience's sensibilities. That's also the rub since it's difficult to have a feeling for an admittedly mysterious subject when the portrait is made up of six shards of a broken mirror. The two-disc 2008 DVD set provides plenty of extras starting with Haynes' rather elliptical commentary track. Also on Disc One are four text pieces under "Intro to Film", one describing the film's six principal characters as facets of Dylan. Disc Two contains six shorts featuring each of the characters replicating the famous card-dropping in Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video. There are also two deleted scenes, four alternative/extended scenes, and an outtakes reel, the total of which runs about a half-hour. Audition tapes of Franklin and Whishaw and a tribute to Ledger are also included, as well as footage from the New York premiere and a twenty-minute featurette on the making of the soundtrack. The centerpiece of the second disc is "A Conversation with Todd Haynes", a portrait of the filmmaker running about 45 minutes that has Haynes talking about the genesis of the film and how it was made. More Dylan-specific text pieces and two theatrical trailers round out the extras.