Preaches to the choir of Dylan fans

Rating: 6/10 (4 January 2008)

"I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' meditation on Bob Dylan's many facets, never mentions Dylan by name, preferring allusion and metaphor instead. Judging by the amount of 10-star ratings this movie has received here on the IMDb, it seems to have found an admiring audience, but I'd bet that most of them are Dylan fans who understand what Haynes is trying to say. I'm a little different: though I very much respect Dylan as a songwriter and musician, I was born in the 1980s, and thus missed all of the cultural moments that Haynes alludes to. As a result, I think my appreciation of the movie was severely diminished.
Haynes does have a reputation for making intellectual or postmodern films, but I feel like that got the better of him here. I loved his "Far From Heaven" because it wasn't merely clever; it made me emotionally involved with the characters and story. "I'm Not There" has fewer emotional moments, and even when I started to feel connected to certain characters, I constantly wondered, "Why is he showing me this? What does this have to do with the rest of the movie, or with Dylan? Is there some hidden meaning I'm not getting?"
For instance, one of the movie's Dylan incarnations is an 11-year-old African-American hobo, played by Marcus Carl Franklin. Franklin has lots of personality and is fun to watch, but still is almost overshadowed by his character's metaphorical, cultural, and historical "significance." And the film's most thoroughly explored relationship is the troubled marriage of actor Robbie (Heath Ledger) and painter Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but that seemed like outtakes from a different story, that of the celebrity who abandons his wife when he gets famous. At least this segment had fewer obscure Dylan references.
I admired much of the acting and Haynes' ability to give each segment a different look and feel, but often I wondered whether I wouldn't have been better off buying a few more Dylan albums and reading something about the real Dylan instead. For example, I really enjoyed Cate Blanchett's performance as the jittery, sneering, gnomic "Jude Quinn"--she does a great job of being incredibly charismatic and incredibly off-putting at once. But if her mannerisms and some of her dialogue were copied from the Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back," as is apparently the case, should I have just watched that instead?
Then there are certain aspects that don't work at all. One Dylan incarnation, "Arthur Rimbaud" (Ben Whishaw) is just on hand to make enigmatic pronouncements. Another, "Billy the Kid" (Richard Gere), shows up in a segment full of if-Fellini-were-American images (à la Tim Burton's "Big Fish"). This is the kind of literal-minded recreation of Dylan's surreal lyrics that made the Broadway musical "The Times They Are A-Changin'" such a notorious flop, and it just feels like padding here.
"I'm Not There" is partially about Dylan's complex relationship with his fans--his desire to keep changing his image, upsetting people's preconceived notions and refusing to preach to the choir. It's too bad, then, that "I'm Not There" is the definition of a preaching-to-the-choir film: probably satisfying for Dylan obsessives, but too cryptic for us Dylan rookies.