Einstein disguised as Robin Hood

Rating: 8/10 (18 September 2008)

Enjoying "I'm Not There" requires a level of acceptance that Dylan is somewhat more than just a well-respected pop star, or even a "living legend." The fact that the movie works at all partially confirms that idea: it's impossible to imagine a movie like this being made about Paul McCartney or even Mick Jagger. We know too much about them to get taken in. Dylan is that rare animal who has achieved massive fame without compromising an essential sense of mystery. He may be the last such animal ever.
This mystery is crucial, because "I'm Not There" is not about Dylan's life; it's about how Dylan is PERCEIVED -- by his fans, his friends, and even by himself.
First we meet Dylan-the-Poser (played engagingly by Marcus Carl Franklin, age 11). This is Dylan as he must have seemed when he first arrived in the New York scene: an impossibly precocious youth, already self-mythologized, seemingly ready to take his place among blues and folk legends whose lives he was too young to have lived, cooed over yet patronized by those who take him in.
The Poser seems happy enough with this treatment; but from beneath the ruse emerges Dylan-as-Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), the sharp-eyed, passionate poet. He speaks directly to the camera, directly to us. ("That's what makes him different," his fans thought then, "it's like he's speaking directly to me.") Swiftly on his heels (following Julianne Moore's amusingly accurate Joan Baez) is Dylan-the-Idealist (Christian Bale, very good). He's the Dylan that sang at civil rights marches, so seemingly pure in his truth-telling that he rejects the society that wants to honor him. (In one of the movie's most intriguing touches, this same Dylan is the one who is later "born again.")
But all too soon appears Dylan-the-Star (Heath Ledger), an actor who gained fame by playing the rebellious Idealist in a movie, whom we follow through a stormy relationship (it's the one Dylan's fans must've felt they were in -- in love with that guy who betrayed them, who turned out to be an egomaniac fake). Then, in the movie's most inspired stroke, comes Dylan-the-Concealer (Cait Blanchett). It's a coup: Blanchett transforms herself from one of the world's most elegant women into a scruffy, squawking proto-punk, desiccated and wired. There's a jittery thrill to her performance; she plays it as if at any moment we'll discover she's entirely the wrong actor for the part, which of course makes her perfect. She keeps one arm crooked in front of her to help conceal her shape; Dylan did too. Under siege from press and fans, the Concealer talks a mile a minute, leaping from one defense to the next -- humor, apathy, venom, and finally, brilliantly, nonsense. This segment is Haynes at his most fun, layering his pop associations so densely that we feel like we're watching "8 1/2", "A Hard Day's Night" and "Don't Look Back" superimposed.
What the Concealer's concealing is the final incarnation, Dylan's Self-Image (a fine Richard Gere). This is Billy the Kid, a rumpled, soft-spoken outlaw only looking for peace in a town of his own imagination. These gorgeously-filmed sequences, mystifyingly drubbed by the critics (had they ever listened to the lyrics?), in fact provide the film's sweetest and most affecting moments, including Jim James' lovely, haunting rendition of "Going to Acapulco".
The movie's not flawless. It drags at times, and frustrates at others. But it stuck with me, and it got me to think about its thesis: that part of what is important about any human achievement is the real, complicated human who achieved it. Take a look at a photo of Einstein. You may not understand the Theory of Relativity, but you understand the face. Wise and fragile, open and mysterious. This person, you think, was on to something. You want to know more.