More parody than homage

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2007)

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There attempts to convey an artistic impression of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan's multi-faceted personality by using six actors to portray him at different phases of his career. Divided into five segments, the film shows Dylan over a period of twenty years as a hobo folk singer, a spokesman for political and social issues, a rock star, a born-again Christian, and a philandering movie celebrity. With its unconventional style, I'm Not There is a slap at linear Hollywood-style bio-pics. An experimental film that, like Bob's personality, is continually shape shifting, the film's very nature does not allow for character development, sense of time, coherence, or even intriguing content.
The first sequence follows an eleven-year old black boy named Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the freight trains to New Jersey to visit Woody Guthrie in a Morristown hospital. In other episodes, Ben Whishaw is a poet-philosopher suggesting Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) is the early Dylan folkie in Greenwich Village and Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) is the celebrity who falls in love with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Cate Blanchett portrays Jude, a stand-in for Dylan on his 1965 British tour in which he was booed for turning to an electric sound. Jude fights off voracious media questioning with put downs and sarcasm but the mimicry is flat and Blanchett's mannered performance fails to convey the playful sweetness of Dylan or even his acerbic tongue. Richard Gere, in a dubious episode, is a Dylanesque version of Billy the Kid who lives by himself and avoids confronting his main rival, Pat Garrett.
Each segment includes Dylan's songs, album covers, and well known photos and cameos by Alan Ginsberg (David Cross), Brian Jones and The Beatles in an attempt to capture "an essential truth" about the artist, yet Haynes' portrait rarely provides any deeper insights than have already been revealed in Dylan's memoirs and films such as Don't Look Back or No Direction Home. Even with all the posturing, the film only barely touches on the essence of who he is and basically stops thirty years ago. It is more parody than homage, exaggerating the audience overreaction to his electric phase and placing too much emphasis on his folk period as being "fake".
Nowhere in the film do we get a glimpse of the excitement that surrounded Dylan's emergence as an artist, or the kind of musical poetry that brought Allen Ginsburg to tears. While the film has some of the great Dylan songs, some sung by Bob and some by stand-ins, there is nothing deeply felt here and Haynes fails to capture the passion and inspiration of his music. Bob Dylan is not a series of archetypes or shifting faces. He is a poet, an artist, a musician, a man who had something important to say and said it in a way that articulated the built-up frustrations of an entire generation. In I'm Not There, in spite of the conceit of the multiple actors, there is only one Dylan - the shadow - masked and anonymous, not the man - vital and creatively alive.