I'm Not There

"It's like yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. You never know what will happen," is the last line of Todd Haynes' cinematic collage I'm Not There, and it's a good summation of what has just happened. Haynes has taken the myth and legacy of Bob Dylan and his music and split it into six, each one existing alongside the other. The result is in very much in keeping with Dylan's career--occasionally brilliant and occasionally maddening.

Dylan was aware of making himself a myth from the very beginning. Though he was a middle-class kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, when he arrived in Greenwich Village in the 1960's he would give interviews stating all sorts of things, like that he was a carny from Gallup, New Mexico. He has reinvented himself many times over. He has been folkie and rock star, Jew and Christian, jester and sage. Haynes' approach is therefore quite appropriate, but the film doesn't completely work as a whole.

There are six Dylans here, but none of them are called Bob Dylan. They all have different names: Woody, an eleven-year-old black kid who rides the rails and enchants hobos with tall tales while strumming a guitar (Marcus Carl Franklin); Arthur Rimbaud, a poet who is going through some sort of inquisition (Ben Whishaw); Jack Rollins, the troubadour who makes a huge splash on the folk scene in the early sixties, playing music in traditional forms but with contemporary lyrics (Christian Bale); Robbie Clark, a movie star who is "James Dean, Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac rolled into one," (Heath Ledger); Jude Quinn, a folk singer who has angered his fans by going electric (Cate Blanchett); and William McCarty, an outlaw hiding out in a town that appears to exist outside of time (Richard Gere).

Of these six facets of Dylan's persona, three of them do not involve music, and I thought those didn't work as well as those that did. None of them are as fully realized as the Jude Quinn segments, which captures Dylan when he was at the height of his fame. It begins with him going electric at a folk festival, and includes the apparently apocryphal anecdote of Pete Seeger attempting to cut the power lines with an ax. There is the flirtation with an Edie Sedgwick-like model, cavorting with The Beatles, and sharing Jesus jokes with Allen Ginsberg: "Come down off there before you hurt yourself!" Mostly this segment deals with Dylan/Quinn's adversarial relationship with the press, which is personified by Bruce Greenwood as a BBC reporter who tries to take off the mask Quinn is wearing. The very best part of the film is when all of this is set to "The Ballad of a Thin Man," which was Dylan's excoriation of the press. It also captures the time when his early fans turned on him for going electric, including his famous concert at Albert Hall when someone in the crowd yelled, "Judas!" and Dylan/Quinn replies, "I don't believe you." Haynes does not choose to add what Dylan did next, which was to turn to his band and say, "Play it fuckin' loud."

Blanchett really nails the Dylan of that period, who wasn't interested in playing anyone's game. When you watch tapes of those press conferences you can almost sympathize with the press, because he never gave straight answers. Haynes doesn't include my favorite, when Dylan is asked what he considers himself. "A song and dance man," is the reply.

The second-best segments involve Franklin as the young boy, Woody, who has taken his name from his idol, Woody Guthrie (who Dylan did worship). Franklin is a terrific young performer, and is quite engaging as a cocky kid full of blarney. There's also a great musical moment when he plays Tombstone Blues with Richie Havens.

Least successful are the Ledger and Gere segments. I've never really thought of Dylan as a matinee idol, so didn't really get the whole Robbie Clark sequences. He is an actor who is married to a French artist (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but has a wandering eye. Is this a comment on Dylan dumping his girlfriend to marry British model Sarah Lownds? He certainly wasn't the first celebrity to have a messy private life, and as these things go, it wasn't particularly that messy.

As for the Gere segments, they certainly are hallucinatory. Gere is William McCarty, which of course was Billy the Kid's real name (a wink at Dylan's participation in Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid). He lives in a western town, Riddle, Missouri, that is being torn down for a highway. Given Dylan's enigmatic qualities, Riddle is surely not an idly chosen name (young Woody also claims Riddle as his home town). The town is a kind of Old West dream state, where zoo animals roam free. It's nice visually but doesn't really have anything to say about Dylan, other than that he is a very private person.

If all this is at times profoundly head-scratching, there's always the music. In addition to Ballad of a Thin Man and Tombstone Blues, a lot of my personal favorites are represented. Bale (apparently lip-syncing) does a nice job with The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, and the Gere segments are scored with the intro to The Man in the Long Black Coat, one of the best from his otherwise fallow 1980s. However, if you are not a fan of Dylan's, there probably isn't much reason for you to see this film.