Cate Blanchett is Bob Dylan. So is Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin and Richard Gere. Alongside them is Charlotte Gainsburogh as wife Sara, and Julianne Moore as Joan Baez. Of course, no one is named Joan or Sara, or Bob. There’s a Robbie (that’d be Heath), but he’s a movie star; he only plays a singer. No one is who they seem to be, and yet everyone is clearly who they are. What is going on here?
That’s the question reviewers have been asking, the question I’ve been scorning and ignoring as I’ve waited to see Todd Haynes’ newest, most ambitious film, “I’m Not There.” Subtitled “Inspired by the many lives and the time of Bob Dylan,” it is at once a dedicated recouting of Bob Dylan’s biography, and a whimiscal cut-and-paste attempt to capture what was probably one of the most hechtic lives lived at the most hechtic time of our century. I have been waiting for this movie since the first hints about its existence began to dribble onto the internet; my interest reached peak frenzy many months ago when a minute-and-a-half long clip of Cate Blanchett (who plays Dylan at perhaps his most iconic) leaked onto YouTube. Wednesday morning began with frantic emails between me and a friend about the soonest show that was playing after work. There was no question about my Wednesday night plans, and I was so completely floored and delighted at the end of the film that it’s taken me four days to be able to verbalize it.
There are six Dylans in this movie, played by five actors and one actress, and only four easily recognized names. The names you perhaps haven’t heard as much about are Marcus Carl Franklin, a fourteen year old black actor who has previously appeared in “Law and Order” and is also going to be in the Michel Gondry-directed, Jack Black and Mos Def-starring comedy “Be Kind, Rewind” (the trailer for which aired before “Southland Tales” and looks awesome) in 2008, but who you can expect to see much, much more of. Marcus plays Woody, the young Dylan who idolized Woody Guthrie enough to travel around the country until he found him, paralyzed and miserable in a hospital as he died of Huntington’s disease, a genetic disease that also killed his mother. Dylan spoke rarely about his visit to see the dying folk legend, but the impression it left on him is obvious, and Franklin plays that scene — which is beautifully included in the film — with such panache and subtlety it’s hard to believe he just entered his adolescence. His Woody is brash and boastful, with the fingerpicking skills to back it up. He is, without exaggeration, extraordinary.
The second less-known name is Ben Whishaw, who starred in last year’s “Perfume” and is actually only featured here in little intervierw bits and pieces. He plays Arthur (named after Arthur Rimbauld, one of Dylan’s favorite poets), who is interviewed by an unknown panel which are vaguely governmental, and his work — like Blanchett’s — is shot in black and white with the iconic finger-in-socket hairdo that Dylan sported around the mid-Sixties. His talent may have been squandered a bit by giving him so little to do, but his dry witticisms thrown in the face of his interviewers (and us, the audience) are moments of acidic brilliance dripped sparingly over the film like a fine vinagrette.
The other four names we know, and know well: Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett. Ledger, thankfully, plays Robbie, the aforementioned movie star. He plays Dylan (or, rather, some kind of Dylan-James Dean-Marlon Brando hybrid; the kind of exaggeration Hollywood has always been prone to) in a movie, on the set of which he meets Claire, played beautifully by Charlotte Gainsborough, the fictional counterpart for Dylan’s real-life-wife Sara. Robbie is only the romantic side of Dylan — it follows his life with Claire as he falls in love with her, marries her, has children with her, cheats on her relentlessly, grows more conscious of public life, and eventually loses her. Ledger’s performance is more subtle than I’ve seen from him in the past, though not quite up to “Brokeback” caliber; he has been handed a difficult role, to be sure, and he is one of the people who doesn’t aim so much for a Dylan impression as an interpretation. But how weak or strong his performance is compared to the other Dylans is moot — he fills his place, and fills it well, fleshing out an emotional side of Dylan that many of us probably never truly believed existed.
Richard Gere is spectacular, and bless his heart he is getting the most criticism for his story. Gere plays Billy, the aged and secluded Dylan, both the one who shot “Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid” and the one who went into hiding after his 1966 nearly-fatal motorcycle accident to figure out who the hell he was. Billy lives in an old-west town called Riddle (there are no incidental names here), which looks like it walked straight out of the HBO series “Carnivale” — all circus-like dustbowl characters with top hats and long brocade coats. To say more is pointless — Billy’s storyline is in one way germaine to nothing and in another germaine to everything. It is, without a doubt, the most discussd part of movie as most reviewers seem to really dislike it. I disagree; I thought it made perfect sense in the movie, and I thought it showed something that we don’t always see in Dylan.
Christian Bale is the only actor blessed with two parts of Dylan’s life to portray, and he does both of them masterfully. Both are named Jack Rollins (a tribute, perhaps, to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, one of Dylan’s biggest influences), and we meet the him for the first time during Dylan’s Folk God time; 1963 and 1964, when he played SNCC rallies and Newport Folk Festivals to crowds of enraptured teenagers, before he picked up an electric guitar and turned against him. 1964-Jack is done perfectly by Bale, who gives an interview on television while clinging to his guitar like a life preserver. He also gives us a beautiful recreation of Dylan’s moment singing “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll” for a field-full of black migrant workers at a SNCC rally in 1963 (here’s a surprise: Christian Bale can both sing, and play). Then he disappears, letting Cate take over with her era as Jude Quinn, before reappearing for a moment later on as Preacher Jack Rollins, who has rejected the life rock and roll gave him in favor of service to the Lord (again, there is another wonderful song performed here, and for all those who are skeptical, while Dylan never became a preacher, he did become a Christan later in life).
And it is the last, not the least, who steals the show. Cate Blanchett has always teased us with glimpses of her extensive talent; she won, quite deservedly, an Oscar for her role in “Elizabeth,” and she is consistently well-reviewed in her films. But here Cate has given us a master performance that will be difficult to overcome, or even escape. She is, to understate it, magnificent. Her character, Jude Quinn (as in “The Mighty Quinn”) is Dylan at easily his most iconic — the frizz-haired, frayed-nerves Dylan who turned on an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and promptly tore the entire folk world into shreds (the adaptation of that moment in “I’m Not There” is hilarious; alone worth the price of admission). She is the prophet, the poet, and the speed freak that Dylan became as he spiraled swiftly down the self-destructive path that led to his motorcycle accident in 1966, Blonde on Blonde in 1967, and the “death” of the old Dylan to birth the man we knew from “Blood on the Tracks” on out (it is no coincidence that Jude Quinn’s first appearance is in the first five seconds of the film on an autopsy table). Moreover, her performance is not an imitation — she has somehow channeled Dylan, and while her voice and her eyes and her head ticks are perfect, her performance seems not to come from her brain, but from her muscles. You quickly forget she is a woman; you quickly forget she is an actor. Her presence is magentic, her performance is electric; as Dana Stevens wrote in her review of the film, “Before, I thought of Cate Blanchett as a beautiful and gifted actress. After this crush-inducing performance, I’m seriously considering flying to Australia to stalk her.”
I agree. I also say that if Cate doesn’t win some kind of Oscar for this (I’d give her Lead Actress myself, but I’m not the academy) I’m not seeing another movie again, ever.
But ultimately the honors and accolades really go to Todd Haynes. His film past is speckled; “Velvet Goldmine” was alright, if a little thin, and frankly I can’t say I’ve seen anything else of his, though I understand “Far From Heaven” is pretty good. “I’m Not There” is genius, however; it is rare that I ever think this after a film, but there was not a single moment of his movie that was in any way disappointing. Critics like Anthony Lane have slammed the movie for not having a traditionally organized timeline — time in “I’m Not There” is spatial, not linear, with characters from all eras appearing side-by-side to tell an emotional, not chronological, story — but they are exaggerating the film’s difficulty and being stubborn about what a movie “is.” I never had any trouble following the film, or its characters, especially after the halfway point, by which time all the actors had familiarized themselves to me.
This movie could easily be this year’s Oscar darkhorse, a smaller film that is getting (deservedly) a ton of buzz. I can’t imagine that the major studio productions that are about to be released can honestly top it — “I’m Not There” is a film made out of love, with love, for and about a man loved and admired by millions. It succeeds where all other Dylan movies fail because it doesn’t really try to understand Dylan. It presents him as he was, a series of characters for our amusement and fascination; we don’t know who he really is, we will never know who he really is. Sometimes I wonder if Dylan even knows who he really is. He has always been the wandering minstrel upon whom we have imposed our dreams, fantasies and nightmares; “I’m Not There” is a collection of those images held up for us to see, a reflection of the audience more than of the man who made the music. As Dylan once accused (and as Jude accuses in this film), “You only want me to say what you want me to say.” With “I’m Not There,” we’re starting to listen.
–Sara Tenenbaum
