 We first meet the real Bob Dylan, lit by a spotlight and blowing into a harmonica, at the very end of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Though there are six evocations of our hero’s persona and dozens of references to his words and images in this film, his actual face is kept under lock and key until the credits. To Haynes, the mystery of who the man is behind closed doors should stay that way: Behind closed doors tends to be pretty tedious if not downright boring. It’s more fun to extrapolate: In the open valleys of cultural myth, a celebrity can become any number of things.
 At first, he’s a young, train-hopping wanderer who has taken the name Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), from his hero Woody Guthrie. He also plays a guitar with ‘This Machine Kills Fascism’ painted on it. Later, the man appears as an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who can’t understand why a decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood) is bullying the locals out of their land. Fitfully, the sequences are shot in the dusty browns of Peckinpah and the hippie westerns of the late 1960s and ’70s.
 In a scratched and uneasy documentary style a la Harlan County USA, we are introduced to Jack (Christian Bale) who goes from being a mythical New York folk singer to a born-again Christian preacher in the south. Aged and ragged, Bale does a terrifyingly acute rendition of Pressin’ On, a cut from the much-bemoaned Saved album, with a gospel choir backing. Jack’s early folk ramblings are the subject of a film starring Robbie (Heath Ledger) who no sooner becomes haunted by the songwriter than he falls for an artist named Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Slowly, Robbie succumbs to the habits and beliefs of the rebellious musician, tearing his family apart. Gainsbourg appropriates a concluding speech from Godard’s Masculine Feminine as she ends her marriage to the actor.
 And then there’s Jude (Cate Blanchett), the androgynous approximation of Dylan-going-electric. The tonal residue of
8 1/2 and a Richard Lester marathon, Haynes’ style becomes wholly ambidextrous in the black-and-white milieu of Jude’s confrontations with television journalist Mr Jones (Greenwood again). The set pieces play like metaphorical jungle-gyms and the performances are brilliant, but Blanchett’s is an act of wonderment; she plays Jude like a marionette barely known to its puppeteer, contorting and shifting to Ballad of a Thin Man, body unencumbered by formal movement.
 I’m Not There, rather than trying to possess the artist, engulfs and nearly drowns the viewer in widespread apparitions, intimations, and projections of him. Films like Ray and Walk the Line are ultimately devalued by their attempts to assign their legends to the realm of humanity; a nagging dream that we could be like them since we’ve been through similar human experiences. But I’m Not There is wholly uninterested in the pitfalls of sex, drugs, marriage, affairs and children. Haynes’ film, certainly his masterpiece to date and one of the year’s best, elusively evokes everything Dylan has reflected while keeping him, as always, ostensibly unknowable. In the words of Bobby Zimmerman, the very ones Haynes ends his film with: “It’s like the past, present and future sitting in the same room together.”
Chris Cabin |
