Regarding 'I'm Not There'

In the 21st century, there are no mysteries. Americans hate them. Maybe it’s more of a general people thing, maybe not. Americans skip to the endings of books (when they can’t find Spark Notes), read the scripts and spoilers before films hit theaters and download the demos before albums come out. Book adaptations dominate theaters, ensuring that the plots are rarely new. Celebrity blogs and news feeds ensure that no artist has privacy. There are no alter egos or secret pasts.

The only thing denser than a Dylan song is a Dylan interview. The man’s personal anecdotes barely make sense on a historical, grammatical or logical level. Have you read his autobiography? It’s crazy. But there’s a charm to that. A mystery.

After the straightforward bio-pics of Ray Charles (Ray) and Johnny Cash (Walk the Line), it is somewhat refreshing to see director Todd Haynes portray the myth of Dylan over the real story with I’m Not There. Billed as “inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan,” I’m Not There deserves credit for subverting the “get money, get famous, get overdosed” plot used by most music bio-pics. Instead, the film consists of a series of broken up short stories starring Dylan-esque characters. It’s a great idea, but ultimately, it falls into the same story arc as more straightforward films, like Hysteria - The Def Leppard Story.

Haynes still deserves credit for his effort, though. With a filmography that includes Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (starring Barbie dolls) and Velvet Goldmine (a David Bowie bio-pic without any Bowie music), he clearly knows how to make an arty film about an arty person. With a cast of Dylans played by Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin, Haynes gets a lot of great performances. Support from Julianne Moore, David Cross, Charlotte Gainsbourg and more are also excellent.

Oddly enough, the best Dylan is a woman, Blanchett. She gets the most screen time, and her drugged-out, Blonde on Blonde-y Dylan is perhaps the closest to the real man. A close second goes to Bale, who plays clean cut folk Dylan and religious, grizzled ’80s Dylan, but Blanchett is the one who gets the best scenes. When she goes electric, she pulls a machine gun on her quiet, folk-loving audience. When she meets idol Allen Ginsberg (Cross), the meeting of two poetic geniuses is heartfelt, yet hilarious.

At the same time, though, Blanchett’s scenes are the most obsessed with drugs, which proves to be a crutch. Viewers see Blanchett falling over and being a tweaked-out jerk a lot, which, coupled with the womanizing/alcoholic Dylan played by Ledger, grows tedious. It’s not the lack of an upswing that makes it so, but the repetitive nature and similarity to other bio-pics. Walk the Line had the same problem—too much beatdown and not enough story-telling. Throw in the surreal but irrelevant “Billy the Kid” Dylan (Gere), and you’ve got a lot of filler.

Another problem plaguing I’m Not There lies in the music. There’s a fair amount of performance footage, and it’s kind of uneven. While Blanchett’s sneering “Maggie's Farm” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” and Bale’s understated “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “The Times They are A-Changin’” are great (and not sung by the actors), other cast members don’t do so well.

Newcomer Franklin, who plays Dylan as a runaway blues-singing child from Minnesota, has an overly precious performance of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Worse, the over-produced cover barely synchs up with the actors on screen, further falsifying the experience. It’s a mess.

But as far as messes go, Haynes’ is a beautiful one. I’m Not There craps out three-quarters of the way through its 135-minute running time, but man is it gorgeous up until then. Haynes switches up his camera techniques according to character. Whishaw (We’ll call him “Conor Oberst” Dylan) gets grainy black-and-white to mirror his inquiry hearing, Blanchett gets classy black-and-white for her ’60s psychadelia, Bale and Moore both get color for their documentary-within-a-film approach… each story has its own style down to the particulars.

That’s I’m Not There’s problem, though. Haynes can’t reconcile all of the stories on a narrative or artistic level. The film feels like a conversation with Dylan himself, which is a compliment to Haynes’ understanding of the source material, but it also means that there’s a whole lot of muddled bric-a-brac. Still, while I’m Not There may not be perfect, at least its vision is a bold one, an interpretation to challenge the straight-forward, formulaic approach of the music bio-pic.