The New York Film Festival press screening for I’m Not There was the most crowded I’ve been to yet; chairs were set up in the aisles, people were zealously guarding their saved seats, and all the critics—usually so finicky about space—were all crammed up with one another. Clearly, Todd Haynes has the power to draw great devotion and curiosity. In tandem with his film’s subject, Bob Dylan, it’s an irresistible draw.
Even the description of Haynes’ film—originally subtitled Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan—doesn’t quite sum up its disconcerting, deliberate strangeness. Six actors portray versions of the singer—some quite close, some totally out there, none of them named Bob Dylan—at various stages in his life, from early origins worshiping at the altar of Woody Guthrie to born-again Christianity in the 1970s. Each character occupies a clear time period, but the narrative shuffles the chronological deck, following several characters at once and eventually looping back on itself. The style of filmmaking varies wildly, from a mockumentary format to highly surreal episodes, such as one character eaten by a whale.
Four actors give Dylan impersonations: Christian Bale as Jack, the Greenwich Village protest singer and, later, born-again Christian; Cate Blanchett as Jude, a wily rock star on a London tour; Heath Ledger as Jack, a Hollywood actor in a failing marriage; and Ben Whishaw, seen only answering questions from an unseen narrator and providing a youthful, edgy narrative voice. Blanchett has been widely praised for her channeling of early-60s Dylan, and she really is mesmerizing; with the signature sunglasses on she’s a dead ringer. Bale and Whishaw also give great performances with significantly less screen time, but Ledger is a bit more a blank slate, in addition to looking nothing like Dylan, despite the wig.
The other two actors also look nothing like Dylan, though only one is definitely not trying. As Woody, a young man riding the rails like a 1930s hobo, 11-year old Marcus Carl Franklin has nothing in common with the real Bob Dylan (Franklin is black), but somehow evokes the freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude presented in his early music. He’s great to watch, and as the first Dylan we see, sets the pace for the interpretations to follow. As the final character, though Richard Gere is a complete enigma; his character is named Billy the Kid, a take-off from Dylan’s role in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The segment is beautiful to watch—Billy lives in a frontier town with major circus influences—but sheds no light on what came before it. When Woody appears to confront Billy the effect is jarring and intriguing, but what it means never really comes across.
What the film gets across best, over and over again, is Dylan’s sense re-creating and re-imagining himself over and over again, constantly struggling against people who think they own a version of him already. As Whishaw says, “Never create anything. People will misinterpret it. It will follow you for the rest of your life and it will never change.” Dylan is a great symbol of the American power of re-invention, and how better to represent that than re-invent your character six times during the film?
I’m Not There is frustrating for anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of Dylan’s career—someone like me—and is likely to turn off anyone but the most dedicated Dylan and cine-philes (and even some of those will likely turn up their noses). But it’s so daring and so inventive, with gorgeous visuals and knockout performances to boot, that it feels like a strange kind of treasure. Haynes and Dylan remain incredibly hard nuts to crack, but put side by side they create a kind of symmetry, a vision of America that might be just fractured enough to be true.
