Review of I'm Not There (2007) by Blake P — 13 Sep 2015

Bob Dylan is the ultimate enigma, a legend so fascinating and so unpredictable that correctly guessing just what he'll do next is a sort of impossible task - even his daring failures seem to quiver in their own sort of spectacular nervous energy. So Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There", a quasi-abstract "autobiography" regarding the singer's long career, is, I suppose, a fitting match for the iconoclast. Portrayed by five actors (and one actress) during different moments of his career, it's a distinctive experimental drama with a wishy washy relationship with coherence - consider that none of the six Dylans have the same name, let alone a similar one, and that the periods they reside under are metaphorical accounts more hazy than penetrable. I'm all for avant garde biopics, but Haynes, for all his directorial finesse, buries any sort of connection in a pile of heavy handed imagery and entangled storytelling. There's a certain sort of preoccupation we find ourselves under during its 135 minutes, but to become invested, to feel changed, to have any sort of reaction, is a fantasy, distant and thousands of miles away.

To describe the plot would be like explaining "Pulp Fiction" in a linear fashion in under a minute, and I'm hardly in the mood for that: we'll say that "I'm Not There" is not so much about story as it is about the characters who reflect Dylan throughout his messy career. There's an eleven-year-old black kid, Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), who works as a living and breathing representation of Dylan's fixation on the folk singer during his childhood. Then there's the young Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who exists in interludes that endure only to give Dylan's soundbites a place to live. Following is Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), an older, wiser being referring to Dylan's role in 1973's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the twenty-something, protesting Dylan, Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), an actor who plays Dylan in a movie and is destroyed by his following fame, and, my favorite, Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the experimental artist that saw commercial backlash at the peak of his career after abandoning what his fans liked most about him.

The labyrinthine nature of "I'm Not There" will prove to be enthralling for Bob Dylan's most devoted admirers, but for someone like me, appreciative of his legacy but not infatuated by it, it is a film that requires a tremendous amount of patience; one can only sit in a weighty dusting of art house hallucinations before they begin to realize that to sit in tedious agony is no way to watch a movie. It's not so much that "I'm Not There" is bad - it's that it's indulgent to the point of agony. I can't imagine anyone other than Dylan diehards and Haynes himself finding much to fawn over, aside from stunning photography and a superb performance from the oddly yet wisely cast Blanchett. (And please: one can only watch Christian Bale's cringeworthy performance for so long before they want to pull their scalp off from all the forced I-am-this-man method dedication.).

"I'm Not There" is not a failure, but to call it a complete success would be a statement too far-fetched to whole-heartedly believe in - a complete success wouldn't have to only appeal to a few people, to work as a puzzle only a few dedicated individuals can (or want to) solve. I applaud Haynes for taking such an audacious artistic risk, but it's a risk that might have paid off had all the unnecessary side characters (Billy the Kid and Arthur Rimbaud, anyone?) disappeared and more time was spent with the chain smoking Jude. If only.