I'm Not There

In a time where the industry is flooded with music biopics, "I'm Not There" comes as a refreshing, if not confusing breath of air. By no means a coherent biopic of Bob Dylan’s life, Haynes film decides to show us an artist and his various identities, and what his work means to others. A true cinematic challenge, Haynes has made a maddening collage of a mysterious and often illusive artist that makes various thrilling shifts in mise en scene that spans through acting, camera work and cinematography. "I'm Not There" proves to be an interesting departure for Haynes, whose more mainstream work like his Douglas Sirk-esque opus "Far From Heaven" has been his current mainstay. This feels more like his early work like the highly controversial "Poison" in the fact that both of them blur the lines of documentary and fiction, while still existing in a peculiar cinematic universe filled with poetic images and harsh realities. Haynes decides early on to have various actors and one actress portray Bob Dylan (not unlike Todd Solondz in his coldly received "Palindromes.") The film begins with a small black child named Woody, who feels misplaced in the early 1960’s playing folksy protest songs and obsessing over Woodie Guthrie, who he eventually meets dying in a hospital. He represents a youthful; ambitious Dylan who feels misplaced in his own time but continuously thrives, even making his way into another time period later into the film. He even plays a Chaplin-like figure that comes to Greenwich Village by storm, yet this scene was eventually cut out of the film.
The rest of Dylan’s representations deal with transition and change. In a medium like Rock and Roll, changing and thriving in one generation to the next is essential to surviving as an artist. Nobody understands this more than Haynes, who makes this the underlining theme of the film. Heath Ledgers character perhaps makes the largest spanning change. A rebellious bad boy who starts out as a kitschy folk singer, he eventually shifts into a jaded celebrity disillusioned by fame and uncertain of how to deal with the family he has left behind, eventually converting to Christianity, not unlike Dylan back in the late seventies and eighties. But Blanchetts portrayal is by all means the most fascinating extension of his identity. In one of her most weirdly endearing performances of her career, Blanchett’s Dylan is androgynous, asexual, sponging in the newly exploding counter culture in all its drug-addled glory. Her Dylan is not man or woman, but an object to be seen with and idolized, a weapon of a confused generation. This Dylan is also confused by his burgeoning fame, confronting one idolizing fan and observer after another. The transition from color to black and white makes this disillusionment clear, since a good deal of it is a tribute to Feline’s 8 ½, which also evolves around a main character uncertain of how to take their fame and fortune.
Richard Gere’s character is not necessarily an extension of Dylan, but a representation of Dylan’s musical mythology. Symbolism and imagery from Dylan’s own lyrics are sprinkled throughout, especially in the sequence where his character visits a town where everyday is Halloween.
Is Hayne’s “I’m Not There” a perfect film? Of course not. One could even be as bold to say it’s pretentious, having the mendacity to portray Dylan as an immaculate god-like artist. But all of these personal criticisms aside, it’s a refreshing step back from testosterone ridden summer blockbusters and cookie cutter Biopics of the past couple of years.