I'm Not There

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Directed by: Todd Haynes

RS: 3.5of 4 Stars Average User Rating: 3.5of 4 Stars

2007 The Weinstein Co. Drama

So what if nothing is revealed. Todd Haynes is a mischievous visionary who puts the music and the myth of Bob Dylan before us in I'm Not There and dares us not to revel in the troubadour's poetic, contentious, ever-changing essence. It's a feast for the eyes, the ears and the Dylanologist scratching around our minds and hearts. And, get this, never once does Haynes mention the name of the mesmeric changeling at his film's center. There's no need: Cover versions of Dylan songs occupy the movie like angels and demons doing battle at an exorcism. Not content with just one actor to portray Dylan in the act of inventing and reinventing himself, Haynes hired six and hit the jackpot with Cate Blanchett. She burns through Haynes' head-trip odyssey like an illuminating torch. Blanchett's soon-to-be-legendary performance is not a stunt, it's some kind of miracle. Playing the skinny, androgynous Dylan in his electric years — when his hair stood on end to match his fried nerves — Blanchett extends the possibilities of acting. You won't see a better example of interpretive art this year by man or woman.

As for the movie itself, don't hang back with the brutes who dis it as art-house blather. Dylan thought enough of Haynes to give him rights to his music. Haynes is a formalist who likes to experiment, be it queer-world fantasy (Poison), glam rock (Velvet Goldmine), environmental terrorism (Safe) or 1950s melodrama (Far From Heaven). In I'm Not There, form and substance coalesce instead of colliding as they did in Todd Solondz's Palindromes, when eight actors of assorted age, sex, race and body type played the same pregnant teen. Why not six actors to rep six phases of Dylan's career, especially with these actors?

Up first is the remarkable Marcus Carl Franklin, 14, Haynes' inspired choice to portray Dylan as a vagabond black boy named Woody (an hommage to Woody Guthrie). Then there's British actor Ben Whishaw, dandied up as Arthur in tribute to Dylan's admiration for the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. The reliably superb Christian Bale gets to manifest two sides of the master, as folk prophet Jack and later the Christian convert Pastor John, revving up the congregation with "Pressing On." Heath Ledger digs deep into the challenging role of Robbie, an actor who plays Dylan in a movie and whose relationship to the painter Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) mirrors Dylan's marriage to and divorce from Sarah Lownds. The final section of the movie, and the most problematic in terms of style shock, belongs to Richard Gere as Billy, not just the outlaw Dylan played in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid but the Dylan who went into exile in Woodstock, New York, after his 1966 motorcycle crash. The Gere sequence, opulently produced and featuring an irresistible rendering of "Goin' to Acapulco" by Jim James, may throw audiences off. But the Fellini-esque circus atmosphere is exactly where the film has been heading all along.

Haynes, who collaborated with Oren Moverman on the deftly intricate script, blends film styles from Jean-Luc Godard to Richard Lester (watch out for an inspired Beatles interlude) to show how far Dylan had to run to escape being pinned down in the lethal glare of public perception. This is never more clear than in the Blanchett segment. Her toking, doping Dylan, named Jude, trades insights with gay poet Allen Ginsberg (David Cross), hits on an Edie Sedgwick-like socialite (Michelle Williams), rages against a prying journalist (Bruce Greenwood) and (surreal alert!) imagines gunning down the folkie audiences at Newport '65 who booed when Dylan traded acoustic for electric. Even behind shades, Blanchett lets us in close to the trapped escape artist rattling his cage. The film, shot by the great Ed Lachman with a camera eye that misses nothing, produces Dylan himself in the end. But he's still not there. Such is the talent of Haynes — and the magnificent Blanchett — that chasing Dylan's shape-shifting shadows becomes an unmissable movie event.

>>Watch every episode of our weekly Peter Travers video podcast by subscribing via iTunes here (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Friday, a new episode featuring clips from the week's newest movies will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

>>Plus: Watch Peter Travers interview I'm Not There director Todd Haynes on ABCNews.com here.

PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Nov 15, 2007)

Your Turn

Give us your review of
I'm Not There

Review 1 of 8

4of 4 Stars

This is in response to Thevanguardband from 28 December. You are either taking the piss, or you have totally missed the point, man. We can only take from Dylan’s music / lyrics a personal perspective and deconstruct it as we see it, but that doesn’t mean that our perspective and Dylan’s is the same. That is what this movie exemplifies. If you call yourself a Dylan evangelist you better wisen up, because Bob would be ashamed.

Feb 19, 2008 18:00:43

Review 2 of 8

4of 4 Stars

About a week before seeing I'm not there I saw No Direction Home again. The content of the two films is very similar---I'm not There is a very good film & leaves you with a good feeling for the complexities that are Bob Dylan---and perhaps "Howling at the Moon".

Jan 3, 2008 01:16:37

Review 3 of 8

2of 4 Stars

I have been waiting for over a year for this movie to come out, as I am a musician and a huge Dylan fan. I was extremely excited when I saw the trailer, thinking that this was going to bring Dylan to an even wider audience, the way Walk the Line did, or the Ray Charles movie. I am what I would call a Dylan evangelist, always taking the opportunity to get more people into Dylan so that they can experience the same mind-altering and uplifting moments that Dylan has given me in my life. But instead, found a movie that has no dramatic structure at all. Yes, I realize that Todd Haynes is on the experimental side, but that doesn't mean you have to throw away all dramatic conventions in the name of being arty. I felt that by the end I didn't even know what the movie was about, or even if it had anything to do with Bob Dylan at all. Great costumes, great sets, but many of the scenes could have been mistaken for a Saturday Nite Live parody of Dylan instead of a tribute. Especially when the script would take some of Dylan's best witticisms and make them sound like cheesy one-liners.
I feel that Haynes should have at least given some insight into why this particular man became a legend as opposed to say, a truck driver. He also lingers on the marriage section of the movie without developing the character of the wife and without revealing why Sarah was so special and important to him and not one of the other thousands of girls that he could have chosen. Heath Ledger's character didn't even look that upset when she called the marriage off, and I just don't buy that Dylan was that unfeeling in reality. He might be stone-faced for the cameras, but there is no way that a man who can write a song like It's All Over Now Baby Blue can have that kind of reaction to the mother of his children. I understand that Haynes was trying to make a structure and feel that reflects the inaccessibility of Dylan himself, but true Dylan fans do, in fact, understand Dylan and his words, it's only the people who would never and will never understand Dylan that this movie was made for.

Dec 28, 2007 13:51:55

Review 4 of 8

Not Rated

I thought "I'm Not There" all in all was a great film. I give it 3 1/2 stars. The one problem I had with it was Richard Gere's part, I didn't get the whole horse/western part of Bob Dylans life, I don't think it was necesarry. I thought Heath Ledger was excellent and Cate Blanchette was too, they both did an outstanding job. I loved the love scene between Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg to Bob Dylans "I want You" it was so passionate and beautiful. The movie was shot so well, the black and white lighting in Cate Blanchette's scenes was a nice touch. I recomend seeing the film to people who haven't yet.

Dec 13, 2007 11:05:57

Review 5 of 8

3of 4 Stars

There is a great review of I'm Not There by two old-school film
veterans on You Tube. They call themselves Reel Geezers. They
are smart, funny and have a perspective worth listening to...
Check it out--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSBH25sN-Rs

Dec 5, 2007 01:24:18

Review 6 of 8

4of 4 Stars

I really enjoyed this film. I think it effectively overturned the idea of an objective biopic; the idea of one determinable identity gives way to a number of mythical personas. Fittingly, since it is a music movie, the soundtrack is part and parcel of the experience for me. It covers such long ground, and each artist's reinterpretation of his songs, reenforces the idea that Bob Dylan and his music are fodder for reinvention. I can't stop listening!

Dec 4, 2007 13:00:34

Review 7 of 8

2of 4 Stars

Several of my friends and I (who know a great deal about Dylan's life and his music) saw I'm Not There. We all agreed that, with the exception of the excitement of Dylan's music and a few well done performances, this is an overly long, often boring, and poorly constructed film. It seemed like the movie was made when film editors were out on strike.

In contrast to Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of An Author, Todd Haynes' six characters were in search of a reason to be in the same script. Haynes turned the raw material of what is important and interesting about Dylan's life and music into a film so dull only professional film critics have reasons to praise it. To paraphrase Ballad of a Thin Man, nothing is happening here, and we knew it.

I'm Not There made us wish we never were.

Nov 26, 2007 14:38:56

Review 8 of 8

3of 4 Stars

Peter Travers' review is right on. Todd Haynes' highly stylized film pays tribute to the creative transformations of the legendary Bob Dylan over his long musical career. Haynes parallels Dylan's shifting style with a film version of musical chairs: an ensemble cast of actors each incarnate the poet-troubadour legend during an important phase of his evolving musical journey. Most successful of the bunch (by a long shot) is the mesmerizing Kate Blanchett. Only her Dylan reaches out from the screen and pulls you into the story -- and more so than documentary footage of Dylan himself.

Todd Haynes' film is an impressionistic artwork that helps the audience understand and "feel" Dylan's driving creative forces: words that capture the truth of events of the moment; melodies that evoke the passions and emotions of the moment; freedom to move unfettered to new stations of the moment; etc. While the movie gives us these insights (into Dylan's driving creative forces) from multiple surrounding perspectives, it does not dig deeply into Dylan's core motivations to reveal, from an underlying perspective, his need for an impenetrable mysterious persona -- which justifies its title, "I'm Not there."

Nov 23, 2007 01:56:34

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