Anthony Lane, New Yorker Review of I'm Not There

The Current Cinema

Tangled Up

“I’m Not There” and “The Mist.”

by Anthony Lane November 26, 2007

Cate Blanchett as one of the Dylanesque characters in Todd Haynes’s new movie.

The new Todd Haynes film, “I’m Not There,” is not a documentary about Bob Dylan. His name is in the opening credits of the movie (“inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan”), and his face looms in closeup at the end, cheeks sucking and swelling to the rhythm of a harmonica, but those are his only appearances. Nor is the film a straightforward dramatization of his existence, or even a slice of it; anyone expecting a Dylanite echo of “Backbeat,” which retold the story of the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, may have reason to be aggrieved. Ian Hart played John Lennon in that film, with recognizable punch and wit, but nobody here plays the actual Dylan. Instead, six actors take six different roles and run with them, each role being a loopy, meandering riff on the sort of life that Dylan has had, or could have had, or conjured in his songs. It makes “Yellow Submarine” look like a miracle of sober narrative.

Take the first example. A young, guitar-toting black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) hops a freight train, finds a pair of hoboes, and declares that his name is Woody Guthrie. The time is the late nineteen-fifties. The kid shows up throughout the film, and we have the pleasure of seeing him perform—an eager, unfeigned pleasure, because Franklin can really sing, and he gets the chance for a brisk trio on a front porch, with none other than Richie Havens plucking away beside him. The question is: What is the kid doing in a film about Dylan? Well, you could view him as an oblique comment on Dylan’s own reverence for Guthrie (as evidenced by “Song to Woody,” on his début album), and on the debt that he owed to a particular strain of black music, but that’s the problem: this “Woody Guthrie” is a comment, not a character. We are kept so busy trying to weigh the burden of cultural meaning that the poor kid has to carry that we never find time to grant him, as a person, anything but the most fleeting of existences. Like the other pseudo-Dylans who populate the story, he is there for a purpose, and behind the gleam of the film—Haynes has an exacting eye for décor, and the rural American past is drenched in sap greens and warm tobacco browns—there is no mistaking a hard, Brechtian sense of dramatis personae being used like tools.
Nonetheless, Marcus Carl Franklin, operating on sheer brio, makes more of an impact than most of his fellow-performers. Four of the other Dylan figures, all played by capable actors, are left stranded in the luscious mire of Haynes’s fantasies. Ben Whishaw, who starred in the malodorous “Perfume,” is interviewed as though under arrest, and gives his name as “Arthur Rimbaud.” (To help us connect the dots, a version of Rimbaud’s most famous phrase, “I is someone else,” is uttered later by another character. Those in the know will feel smug; everyone else will be baffled.) Christian Bale, as authentically gaunt as the folk-era Dylan, plays Jack Rollins, who shows up in New York and transfixes the musical scene; toward the end, he emerges as a born-again Christian pastor in California—a deliberate overstretch by Haynes, since Dylan, though he turned to God in the late seventies, was never a minister. Then, there is Heath Ledger, who plays an actor named Robbie, who himself plays the fractionally Dylan-like hero in “Grain of Sand,” a nonexistent Hollywood film, and whose wooing of a French painter (Charlotte Gainsbourg) takes up an unlikely slice of the action. Got that? Just as you’re wondering how much farther from the art of Bob Dylan this movie is prepared to stray, up pops Richard Gere.

This, I fear, is where my patience snapped, and I doubt whether that of Dylan fans will prove any more elastic. Gere plays Billy—a nod to Billy the Kid, and thus to the music that Dylan contributed to Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973), in which he also acted. But the Gere rendition is little more than a lazy gloss on the legend of the vanishing West; as a rule, any film that offers cameos to circus performers and random zoo animals has reached the point at which invention becomes desperation. The problem for “I’m Not There” is not one of credibility (after all, these tales are meant to be tall) but of what authority a movie retains when its component parts fly off in different directions. Dylan, to judge by the ardor of his admirers, is indeed inexhaustible, in his gifts as in his changes of tack, and one quite understands why Haynes—who co-wrote the film with Oren Moverman—should have scorned a plain bio-pic. To come at a stubborn subject from multiple angles was a smart move, but Haynes is so enthralled by the stylistic opportunities that his plan affords, as he was in the fifties-hued “Far from Heaven,” that he ends up more interested in the angles than in anything else, leaving the elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away.
If the new film does cohere, for a while, that is thanks to Cate Blanchett, who, armed with curly wig and shades, delivers Jude Quinn, the most gripping of the Dylans on display. She looks like Elizabeth I after a long night out with Walter Raleigh and his packet of virgin smokes. We see Jude in London in the mid-sixties, hazy with drugs, larking with the Beatles (in a breakneck homage to “A Hard Day’s Night”), and generally treading the ground that was covered by D. A. Pennebaker in “Don’t Look Back” (1967), his concert-tour documentary. The best thing in the film is the probing of Jude’s past and conscience by a British journalist (Bruce Greenwood), whose questions about the responsibility that the artist—any artist, from Dylan on down—bears to the wider world are left blowing in the wind.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/11/26/071126crci_cinema_lane