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Review: Freewheeling, magical 'I'm Not There' re-creates Dylan in all his guises

By J.A. Montalbano
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

'I'm Not There'

Opens today: Century Downtown

Rated: R

Running time: 135 min.

Director: Todd Haynes

Grade: A-

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It's probably not possible to get a handle on Bob Dylan — the man, the myth, the legend.

But Todd Haynes' achingly devoted new film, "I'm Not There," which takes Dylan's life story and presents it as a funhouse mirror, is as good an attempt as any.

And if you can get past the conceit — a fictionalized account in which Dylan is portrayed at various stages of life by four men, a woman (the inspired Cate Blanchett) and a black boy — you'll find a gorgeous film and a thoughtful meditation on identity.

Haynes is a fringe director who made the quirky paranoia films "Poison" and "Safe" in the early '90s and broke out in 1998 with his most widely praised film, "Velvet Goldmine," starring Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Christian Bale. Four years later he overreached with "Far From Heaven," the 1950s period piece that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a parody or a weepy drama and didn't succeed at either.

Here, taking his requisite three years between films, Haynes is assured, and his material is rich and layered. He co-wrote "I'm Not There" with Oren Moverman, who penned 1999's "Jesus' Son." And the tale they tell of a mostly Vietnam-era Dylan is an appropriately heady mix of philosophy, whimsy and nostalgia.

I can't attest to how this movie feels if you're not a fan of the protest singer turned pop idol turned born-again Christian turned born-again folkie turned roadhouse troubadour. (I also can't guide detractors of Richard Gere, who plays one of the Dylan roles.)

But "I'm Not There" comes off as a labor of love, reaching deep into an impossibly diverse catalog of music and picking out pitch-perfect performances. Haynes somehow pays homage to the man, questions his motives and behavior, and turns it all into a fascinating psychoanalysis session that zips by in 135 minutes.

The film begins and ends on a train, and it's a fine metaphor for the movie's desire to journey both into the future and into the past, as Haynes toys with the time continuum. The first image of Dylan is as a black child (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails in 1959 but acting as if it's 1939 and calling himself Woody Guthrie.

The middle-age version, played by a grizzled Gere, throws us back to the Old West, with Dylan now Billy the Kid (remember him in the Peckinpah movie?), confronting a decrepit Pat Garrett, who is played by Bruce Greenwood ("Erotica"), who earlier in the film also portrays an arrogant BBC music critic who confronts Dylan (as played by Blanchett) in London during the mid-'60s period immortalized in the documentary "Don't Look Back."

Got it? That's just the start. We also get:

• Ben Whishaw ("Perfume: The Story of a Murderer"), as a 20-year-old Dylan under the guise of his poetic muse, Arthur Rimbaud, filmed in stark black-and-white and serving as a one-man Greek chorus, spouting philosophical chapter headings such as, "A song is something that walks by itself."

• The typically wooden Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, the earnest protest singer.

• Heath Ledger as actor Robbie Clark, who struggles to come to terms with being a husband and father. Ledger captures the more human Dylan we've come to know through memoirs. And Haynes, who re-creates the simple gloss of the '50s and '60s, lets us taste and smell the early '70s, when Dylan was directionless and headed toward divorce and his epic breakup album "Blood on the Tracks."

The idea of Dylan as a film star contributes to a cartoon quality that at times makes "I'm Not There" feel like a Christopher Guest parody. The comedian David Cross (TV's "Mr. Show" and "Arrested Development") shows up as Allen Ginsberg, and you can't help but laugh, because it's David Cross, and he and Haynes aren't playing it totally straight. It's hipster corn, and everyone manages to pull it off.

Other performances have just the right tone. Julianne Moore is the wistful Joan Baez figure reminiscing, and Charlotte Gainsbourg will just break your heart as the artist, muse, lover and mother.

But it's Blanchett — as the out-of-control, pill-popping genius on the brink of worldwide stardom and headed toward a motorpsycho nightmare — who embodies both the man himself and the tightrope act Haynes is trying to pull off here.

She has it all down pat: the attitude and the tics and the Ferlinghetti-voiced sneers at the stuffy reporters. (She gets his way of lighting a cigarette just right.)

She's the lightning rod of the movie, and she absorbs it all like an actor diving headlong without fear, trusting her director not to make her look bad.

And Haynes delivers. He gets silly (in one scene, Blanchett's Dylan is romping on a lawn with the Beatles as if it were an episode of "The Monkees") but then hits you with a line like "Never create anything; it will imprison you" while Blanchett sits, chin in hand, staring a hole through something off-screen. But then we're back at a swingin' disco, with Michelle Williams camping it up as girlfriend Coco Rivington as a Monkees song plays in the background, completing the circle.

We fall into the swirl of the '60s, descending into our own drug haze as we see LBJ utter lines from "Tombstone Blues": "Death to all those who would whimper and cry." At other times, Bale's lip-syncing is almost intentionally out of sync, as if to suggest a few seconds might as well be the same as a few centuries.

Meanwhile, the plot and the songs travel along parallel winding roads, and when they intersect occasionally, it's magical:

• "I Want You," one of the all-time great love songs, touches off a scene of Dylan and his girlfriend conjuring up the arm-in-arm "Freewheeling'" street image and segues sweetly into a tender sex romp.

• When Dylan visits his idol, the dying Guthrie, in a New Jersey state sanitarium, the image is as heartbreaking as the song that accompanies it, "Blind Willie McTell."

• And a cluttered, circuslike Old West scene comes to a halt for a wrenching version of the "Basement Tapes" chestnut "Goin' to Acapulco" by Jim James of My Morning Jacket, with the singer made up in Rolling Thunder-era white face paint.

"I'm Not There" often feels like a dream, as if it were inspired by the Dylan outtake "Series of Dreams," and the accompanying video that shows him riding in a train and staring out the window, the Blanchett-era star hiding behind dark sunglasses and watching a movie montage of his life, both past and future. How much of this really happened?

It all makes sense as a poignant treatise on how we present ourselves to the world, how artists handle fame and how we rush to freeze them in their first instance of celebrity. Dylan — or should we, at this point, call him Robert Zimmerman? — invented his persona from the get-go and then teased and taunted the world with his various guises every step of the way.

He chafed at the media and at society for trying to pigeonhole him as a protest singer. He could be anybody he said he was — Billy the Kid, Woody Guthrie, an actress, a black boy, LBJ, a divorced father — because he was the artist, in control of his creation.

Before the final credits we see actual footage of Dylan, working his harmonica like the pained whistle of a lonesome train, off to either the past or the future, and the scene fades. It's an endless solo.