Meet Todd Haynes, former semiotics major at Brown University. Ever since first achieving a degree of underground notoriety with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which dramatized the late musician’s struggle with anorexia via mutilated Barbie dolls, Haynes has gravitated toward signifiers rather than traditional characters; his movies, while invariably smart and savvy, often feel as though they ought to be accompanied by a study guide and seen only by those who’ve passed a rigorous entrance exam. Not conversant with ’70s glam rock? Good luck getting much out of Velvet Goldmine. Unfamiliar with the subversive melodramas of cult director Douglas Sirk? Half the point of Far From Heaven may well fly over your head. And yet I still wasn’t quite prepared for the unapologetic exercise in annotation that is I’m Not There, Haynes’ new exegesis—sorry, there’s no other word—of the many personae of Bob Dylan. No matter how well-worn your copies of Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, odds are good that you’ll emerge from its welter of references and allusions utterly befuddled.
Admittedly, the film boasts a doozy of a conceit: Six different actors play Dylan, each one representing a different period of his life and a unique facet of his mercurial public image. Haynes kicks things off with maximum alienation by introducing Dylan-the-Woody-Guthrie-acolyte as a prepubescent black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who’s riding the rails with a couple of hobos. Christian Bale, who’s viewed only in fake documentary footage, takes over as Dylan-the-freewheelin’-folk-phenomenon, and later reappears as Dylan-the-born-again-Christian. Repeated scenes in which Ben Whishaw, an English actor who starred in last year’s Perfume, delivers impassioned Rimbaud-inflected monologues directly to the camera must concern some aspect of Dylan’s past with which I’m wholly unfamiliar—call that one Dylan-the-beats-me. We get Heath Ledger as Dylan-the-matinee-idol (huh?), though these sequences exist primarily to explore his romantic side; Richard Gere turns up as Dylan-the-Western-outlaw, an oblique reference to his appearance in (and soundtrack for) Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And the plum assignment—Dylan-the-electrified-turncoat, familiar to anyone who’s seen the classic doc Don’t Look Back—goes to, of all people, Ms. Cate Blanchett.
As it turns out, Blanchett is the best reason to see I’m Not There, as she’s the only one of the sextet who truly embodies a recognizable Bob Dylan; her bravura performance transcends the facile mimicry of her Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn, capturing not just Dylan’s adenoidal mannerisms but also his unruly prankster spirit. And, of course, there’s a certain arresting cognitive dissonance in seeing him portrayed by a woman—a ploy that also extends to the black-kid incarnation, presumably meant to literalize the folk movement’s debt to African-American spirituals. These two pseudo-Bobs are so far removed from the source that they possess the liberty to exist as well as to evoke, whereas the other four rarely function as anything more than stark concepts. Haynes clearly had a blast shooting each section in a different style—a strategy he previously employed in his 1991 triptych Poison—but there’s not much to do once you’ve either identified a given representation’s source or simply accepted your ignorance. (I freely confess that I have no clue why Ledger is playing Dylan as a second-tier movie star; he might just as well be doing a gloss on Neil Young or Pat Boone, as far as I’m concerned.)
In short, I’m Not There, with its panoply of surface affectations and its deliberate structuring absence, is more of a great idea for a movie than a great movie per se. Rabid Dylanistas may appreciate it somewhat more than the great unwashed, but even those who recognize every stray reference will likely experience the film as little more than a vaguely playful blur. (And it’s hard to imagine any hypothetical viewer who won’t cringe during Gere’s segments, which are such a sorry excuse for mythopoetic badinage that they call to mind a Levi’s ad.) Like most of Haynes’ films—the sole exception being Safe (1995), his excoriating portrait of self-help culture by way of “industrial illness,” which not coincidentally is far and away his best work—I’m Not There is so relentlessly academic that it comes more into focus the further away from it you get. At which point it inevitably looks quite small.
I’m Not There
**
Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin
Directed by Todd Haynes
Rated R
Now playing