original and imaginative

Rating: 8/10 (13 July 2008)

In making a movie about the legendary musician/songwriter/poet/social activist Bob Dylan, filmmaker Todd Haynes could have hired a single actor to impersonate his subject and then related the key events of his life in standard chronological order. But Haynes clearly had something deeper and more complex in mind when he envisioned this work. The result, "I'm Not There," is a boldly original movie that is part truth and part deliberate fiction, part straight-forward narrative and part pseudo-documentary, part stark realism and part surrealistic fantasy. And while all of the elements don't work equally well together, the movie as a whole still provides a fascinating portrait of one of the key artists and musicians of the second half of the 20th Century.
Haynes breaks one of the cardinal rules of biographical storytelling right off the bat by having no fewer than six actors - Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin - portray Dylan at various stages of his career and life. And, in an act of even greater audaciousness, he has assigned each of these roles a different fictitious name (and it isn't because Haynes feared he might be sued for his efforts since Dylan himself okayed the movie). Haynes, with the assistance of co-writer Oren Moverman, then arranges the various pieces into a time-shifting mosaic that allows us to see Dylan at all those discrete moments in his life virtually simultaneously. Finally, he incorporates many of Dylan's songs on the soundtrack to serve as a sort of running commentary on both the character and the times in which he's living.
Haynes makes it clear that Dylan was as much a product of those times as he was a shaper of them. The film shows us his early days as an idealistic young singer/songwriter (here named Woody after Dylan's boyhood hero and role model Woody Guthrie), who has just escaped from a juvenile detention facility and is now riding the boxcars, his guitar in hand, strumming out protest songs in defense of the underprivileged and working classes. We then follow Dylan through the various stages of his life: first, as Jack (Bale), a rising young folk singer in Greenwich Village; then as Jude (Blanchett) an anti-establishment pop culture hero, singing and speaking out against social injustice and the Vietnam War; later (still as Jude), as a press-hounded "celebrity" often denounced as a "sellout" for adopting the very elitist lifestyle he'd earlier railed against in his works. The roles assigned to Ledger and Gere provide even more radically oblique takes on the Dylan persona. Ledger plays Robbie, a Hollywood actor who's portraying Jack (i.e. Dylan) in a film on his life, while Gere represents an aging version of Dylan, envisioned here as Billy the Kid, living in the wild west and taking on the legendary Pat Garrett in an effort to save a small town from being subsumed by an evil corporation (this is definitely the most "out there" of all the story lines in the film and, without a doubt, the least compelling and effective).
Of the actors, Blanchett gets to play Dylan at what is probably the juiciest and most provocative period of his life (at least from a character standpoint), the time when he alienated many of his earliest fans by "reinventing himself" as it were - turning away from traditional folk music in favor of a much edgier rock'n'roll sound, and transforming his own image from that of a jeans-wearing man of the people to that of a sunglasses-sporting, Carnaby-clad - and now quite remarkably cynical - pop culture celebrity. Blanchett's vivid performance captures the tormenting self-doubt of a man caught between being a "spokesman" for a social movement and a simple human being trying to survive in the very world he's being called upon to denounce. The movie raises the question of whether it is ever possible for an artist to remain a social iconoclast after he has attained the level of a cultural icon - with all the attendant compromise that comes with such a status.
Next to Blanchett, Ledger gives what is probably the most fully-rounded performance in the film, fleshing out the domestic side of the public figure in his thoughtful portrayal of Dylan as husband and father.
Haynes' eclecticism involves the mixing together of not only various time periods but of wildly varying film-making styles as well. For instance, some of the stories are shot in black-and-white while others are done in color, just as he uses a traditional narrative technique in some sequences yet documentary-style reportage in others.
The film does suffer from a number of serious, though nowhere near fatal, flaws. As noted earlier, the Richard Gere section comes across as too arbitrary and tacked-on to feel fully a part of the rest of the film. And the movie does run on a trifle longer than it needs to in order to make its point. Moreover, the overly objectified style of the movie, impressive as it is, nevertheless, has the perhaps inevitable effect of distancing us so much from the subject matter that the heart, as opposed to the head, is never really fully engaged in what it is showing us.
Still, for the sheer unadulterated love Haynes demonstrates for his medium and the insight the movie offers into a beloved cultural icon, "I'm Not There" is a work very much worth savoring, faults and all.