I'm Not There

Where to begin with Todd Haynes’ biopic of Bob Dylan? It looked like it was going to be the kind of variation on a theme he’d made when he revived Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven, only this time with D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back as the blueprint. While the black and white Cate Blanchett segment is at the core of this curious six part journey it never falls simply into stylistic imitation. I can’t recall any other film so bent on a tour of narrative styles with the exception of the haunting 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. Indeed, it moves with such a restless invention it isn’t that much concerned with fidelity to the actual life of Dylan. No bad thing if we survey the erratic and mostly under-performing history of movie biopics.

We begin with an 11 year old black boy riding in a boxcar, he has a guitar, on its case is written, This Machine Kills Fascists. As much as we’re going into a very peculiar fantasy – the boy’s name is Woody Guthrie – with quite specific allegorical aims and debts to the lore of Dylan, the intimacy is never forced. By the time he plunges into a lake and falls deep into a beguiling dream-like sequence which suddenly takes us back to a kind of American South magical realism we have already been introduced to another Bob Dylan. Throughout the film literalism is denied. So, there is Dylan as played by Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere. It sounds very tricksy having another 5 actors play essentially the same figure, and it sounds a waste of time if you don’t much care for Bob Dylan but I’m Not There is something very rare, a film with a unique ambition which leaves you completely elated. Memorable films get made and sometimes a film comes along which push that bit further into the uncharted, and “makes it new”. There are a great many directors who helm interesting and highly crafted films but utterly lack the spark of magic which sends you out from the picture-show into the nearly total negative of the outside world with a confirmed faith in man.

The main contrast is with No Direction Home. Worthy enough but lacking in inspiration. Here the incendiary arrival of the electric Dylan at Newport is announced as Bob and The Band turning on the audience with machine guns. Weaving a reflexive spell through the “music and many lives of Bob Dylan” it’s like watching a how-to on bringing together quite disparate influences from Fellini, Godard, and crystalline moments of texture from others like Truffaut, Peckinpah, Richard Lester, Sirk and so on. Always in this prismatic work is a critical sense of what makes identity and the difficulty in tying it down alongside a vigourous questioning of how much Dylan’s art resides in ruse rather than conviction.

Broadly speaking it follows a chronology of Dylan as child of the blues to protest singer to electric pop star to the retreating movie star and a reclusive Billy the Kid and to born-again Christian. Dominating the film is Cate Blanchett as Jude, the clearest impersonation of the singer. At times it works almost as a paraphrase of the Pennbaker documentary till embracing the dreamier side it starts to trip out on the drug excesses of the 60s. The Beatles, Ginsberg, disgruntled folkies, a knife wielding fan, and Swinging London hipsters pass by and notably, Bruce Greenwood as Mr Jones, a pedantic interrogative journalist with whom we enter a mysterious world of connection, as Stephen Malkmus sings Ballad of a Thin Man.

The surrealist flights of imagery in the songs can get a little wearing for me, such an immature abundance - the fish truck that loads while his conscience explodes - here its mediated by a formal understanding of film as a musical expression – like Scorsese or Tarantino – so everything is instilled with a sense of its timeliness. It unfolds like a song which is taking you back to something that seemed lost. There is an exquisite care for detail, for the passing of the 60s into a more remote 70s. From a traditional black meal-time in the South to an increasing distance, mirrored in luxurious furnishing to the fantasy of a Wild West alter-ego, it speaks the allure of art as interpretation.

For some this is too much of a hike, a highly indulgent foray into auteurism without a centre. The problem lies in how anything like a conventional portrayal would have got even faintly close to the enigma of Dylan. When Heath Ledger plays a movie star version of the protest singer Dylan (Bale) it captures exactly how the style of apparent imitation falls short. Frankly, the level of style in this film is so nuanced it’s full effect is for only a very few, but this is hardly reason to condemn it. How dull had this been content to be a typical studio movie. Instead, it works as much as a Todd Haynes’ creation as it does a well researched account of Bob Dylan. It would have been easy enough to rattle off a Dylan Greatest Hits on the soundtrack but thankfully, it mostly steers clear of the obvious featuring many cover versions from the likes of Tom Verlaine, Sonic Youth and others. Like the title, I’m Not There much of the soundtrack has sought inspiration from The Basement Sessions and goes for the overlooked.

The last part with Richard Gere as Billy the Kid is regarded as the weakest. Having survived Pat Garrett he now lives quietly in Riddle with a dog, at least until his nemesis Garrett returns to flatten the town for a railroad (or was it a highway?). This addresses the recluse, the Dylan of the 70s and, to some extent the Western he appeared in, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It does play with a more traditional form but also its use of space has been completely missed, particularly, how it contrasts with the alienated life-style Heath Ledger part. It ends aphoristically, Gere’s voice-over drawing together the fragments, like a line from Pynchon more than Dylan, as Billy jumps on a train and finds a guitar, and written on its dusty case: This Machine Kills Fascists. The film coalesces all of its previous versions into a series of cuts quite movingly and then finally there’s Dylan himself.

Charles Maclean