BOB Dylan would probably love “I’m Not There,” which may be all a Dylanist needs to know before seeing it. Non-devotees are in for puzzlement, if not exasperation.
Writer-director Todd Haynes’s model for approaching “the music and many lives of Bob Dylan” has more than a touch of genius to it, and it’s bound to be imitated. You can almost hear Orlando Bloom telling his agent, “I, too, am many men in one! Why not have six different actors portray me in a cubist hallucination?”
The movie doesn’t exactly line up with Dylan’s life, but places his songs (many of them original recordings, some covers) in a Fellini-esque maze. Legends such as Dylan’s going electric at the Newport Jazz Festival and conversion to Christianity in the 1970s inspire treatment ranging from glancing allusions to full-blown parodies, while actors portraying surrounding figures (Joan Baez, Edie Sedgwick) pop in and out with their names changed but many essential truths remaining.
Non-Dylanists will detect pretension and flattery – any barroom pickup artist knows that the surest way to get a girl to like you is to say something like, “I can tell there are a lot of sides to you.” They’ll wonder why, for instance, young Dylan is portrayed by a black child (Marcus Carl Franklin) who rides boxcars, talks about the union (“Don’t he know it’s 1959?” says a fellow hobo) and tells everyone his name is Woody Guthrie.
That is an inspired way to approach the early Dylan – a middle-class Minnesotan who became obsessed with Guthrie’s twangy truth-telling and, hitting the clubs in New York singing about blind Willie McTell, constructed a Guthrie-like backstory for himself.
In other scattered episodes, Dylan is an arrogant young poet calling himself Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) who deflects the investigation of unseen inquisitors (“I’m not fatalistic; bank tellers are fatalistic. I’m a farmer”), a folk sensation named Jack Rollins (Christian Bale); Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who portrays Rollins in a movie and has an unhappy marriage to a French painter (Charlotte Gainsbourg); an aging Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who lives like a ghost in small-town Missouri in a reference to Dylan’s 1973 movie “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”; and a chain-smoker hiding behind Wayfarers while rejecting the role of voice of his generation.
This last Dylan, who dominates the film, is played by Cate Blanchett in an unfortunate bit of stunt casting. As in most of Blanchett’s movies, the sound of her knock-knock-knockin’ on Oscar’s door drowns out everything around her.
But there are many glories on offer here; for me, merely hearing “Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” on a theater-caliber sound system is an exhilarant. Some songs match the action (“I Want You” plays against a sweetly hopeful sex scene), others bounce off it at interestingly oblique angles. When the Ledger character’s wife discovers his infidelity and Nixon announces the end of “the longest running war in television history,” the song choice is “Visions of Johanna.” It’s hard to say why this scene works so brilliantly – but so it goes with Dylan’s strangely gorgeous lyrics.
In another scene, we watch an actor (Heath Ledger) playing an actor (Robbie) playing the singer Jack Rollins (Bale), who stands in for Dylan, complaining that he didn’t want to be the king of the rebels. We’re into fractal cinema here. It’s a deeply clever way for Haynes to suggest that Dylan is so self-conscious that Dylan is always acting, even when he’s refusing to play somebody else’s conception of him, even when he’s playing himself.
Gere’s section is the weakest, and the movie overstays its welcome by 20 minutes or so. How much Delphic defiance do we need to hear from Whishaw and Blanchett – “I’m a trapeze artist, sightin’ it and hearin’ it” – before the point is made? Meanwhile, Dylan’s discovery of Christianity is dismissed in five minutes, in shades of “Boogie Nights.”
Haynes’s Dylan has as many angles as a snowflake, and is as difficult to hold onto. There is hagiography here, but Haynes has produced a thing of art that sends you out of the theater exactly as Dylan (and Rimbaud) would have it: with a riot of perfumes.
I’M NOT THERE
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
Running time: 135 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sexuality, nudity). At the Film Forum and the Lincoln Plaza.