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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/20/07)

Todd Haynes's new film is, as they might say in semiotics class, a dense text. Contrary to pre-release reports — not to mention the movie's advertising — it is not a fictionalized Bob Dylan biopic with six different actors playing Dylan at different phases of his career, as he morphs from persona to persona. No, it's a lot more complicated. The six actors — Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, and Marcus Carl Franklin — all play different characters in some way inspired by Dylan's varied personae. African-American Franklin plays an 11-year-old kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie; he rides the rails carrying a guitar that has the real Guthrie's adage "This machine kills fascists" written on the case. Bale is Jack Rollins, the earnest, denim-shirt wearing protest singer who galvanized the folk scene in early '60s Greenwich Village. (Julianne Moore hilariously nails a Joan Baez type in the film's faux-doc on Rollins's life.) Ledger is Robbie Clark, a Brando/Dean type actor who makes his name portraying Rollins in an earnest Hollywood film. (His "episode," really, is more about Claire, the abandoned painter wife of Clark and a stand-in for certain women in Dylan’s life, played with both charm and deep rue by Charlotte Gainsbourg.) Blanchett is Jude Quinn, the wiry embodiment of the "thin…wild mercury sound" Dylan tried to capture with Blonde on Blonde — antic, goofily stoned, androgynous almost to the point of epicene, but capable of a frightful righteous anger. Gere is Billy — maybe the Kid, maybe not, a ghost out of the more lyrical passages of Peckinpah for sure — making trouble while Pat Garrett tries to build a six-lane highway through his idyllic Altmanesque Old West town. And Whishaw is Arthur Rimbaud, an elegantly wasted dandy poet who's fielding questions from an unnamed and seemingly unamused committee.

Got that? Dylan's music is threaded throughout, and while some sections of the film come off like direct lifts from Dylan's life — particularly the Jude Quinn stuff, which draws on the period beautifully documented by D.A. Pennebaker in Don't Look Back — others are riffs drawn from a song, an idea for a song, a feeling from a song, an idea of Dylan, an idea of the life he led. The movie invites the viewer to draw correspondences to "reality," and the more of a Dylanologist you are, the better you'll be able to. Dylan is the exemplary artist for such a treatment, as he and his work can and do serve as prisms with which to view the history and culture of the world Dylan inhabited as well as the worlds he evoked. This status has no doubt been a genuine burden for Dylan the actual human being, who these days manifests himself as a tour dog, occasional record-maker, and avuncular and staggeringly knowledgeable radio-show host. Hence the picture's title, and title song, an unreleased number from the legendary Basement Tapes sessions.

At the same time as I'm Not There invites the aforementioned correspondence-drawing, it actively resists such activity. This creates an interesting, and sometimes irritating, but consistently stimulating, um, dialectic. But it made me want to see the film at least one more time, and I’m glad I did, because if you force yourself to stop playing spot-the-reference, I'm Not There turns into an often-moving emotional journey not just about art-making and culture and America, but about a deeper disconnectedness. The sense of alienation and temporal drift, particularly in the Gere section, which I initially considered the weakest, is directly reminiscent of another picture about a strange, um, rock star: Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. There's another kind of richness within this film that goes beyond the cerebral, chasing a transcendence that I’m not sure Haynes actually believes in.

That said, the depth of the film's referentiality is kind of astonishing — more so when you consider the artists covering the Dylan songs on the soundtrack — Blanchett opens her mouth, but Steve Malkmus's voice comes out of it. (I was particularly taken with a quote from Godard's Masculin-Feminine, which is itself a quote from Georges Perec's novel Les Choses — although I imagine it's possible that Haynes doesn't know that, as I've never found a writing that cites it.)

I'm sure a few people reading this review might think, "Well, that's all fine, but who on Earth is this film actually for?" Well, for one thing, it's for anybody who thinks that the adventurousness of semi-mainstream American movies is gone, gone, gone. Haynes's picture may not be perfect — hell, I'm not even sure that perfection is a state it even aspires to — but it's bold and individualistic and accomplished. A reason to take heart for the state of current American moviemaking.

— Glenn Kenny