Ambitious films are always worth watching. They may succeed or they may fail. Either way, though, they are entertaining, if only because the scope of their aspirations gives the entire experience a vigor that humbler films lack.
Todd Haynes’s scattershot homage to Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There,” is an ambitious film. It’s the antithesis of the sort of well-behaved mainstream biopic we’re accustomed to. Rather, it’s a postmodern pastiche and a cinematic acrobatic feat.
Six different actors portray Bob Dylan. Or rather, each actor plays a different fictional character who represents either an epoch in Dylan’s life or a part of his identity as an artist and as a human being. To confound matters further, each character has an individual story line, and the movie jumps from one story line to another continually.
It should be confusing, but by some crazy twist of scriptwriting panache, the concept works. The metaphorical purpose of each character is usually clear enough that we don’t get lost. It’s apparent, for instance, that newcomer Marcus Carl Franklin, who plays a black kid claiming to be folk musician Woody Guthrie, represents Dylan’s youthful beginnings.
Christian Bale, playing singer-songwriter Jack Rollins, stands for Dylan’s early breakthrough years.
Yet not every allegorical character is a welcome inclusion.
Heath Ledger and Richard Gere give performances that are devoid of zest and energy, and so their appearances amount to nothing but dead weight. It doesn’t help that their respective story lines lack cohesiveness and a sense of purpose.
Thankfully, Cate Blanchett is around to alleviate matters. She’s the best Dylan imaginable: from the hairstyle to the idiosyncratic mannerisms. Hers is also the best section in the film, a black and white travelogue that resembles and continually references the European cinema of the 1960s.
Through Blanchett, Dylan is revealed to be an artist in search of an identity, trying to find an honest balance between personal truth and public truth, yearning to remain an individual, even as society tries to make him a symbol for larger social movements. These conflicts reverberate throughout, but they’re most evident while Blanchett is on-screen.
Whenever the camera leaves her, the thematic strength of the film wavers, so things seem uneven.
Despite such quibbles, “I’m Not There” remains an engagingly atypical reinterpretation of an icon’s life.
Hallowed standards of storytelling, such as character growth and plot progression, are diffused and complicated by a sort of narrative cubism that hopes to convey Dylan’s own personal confusion. Call it high-minded. Call it ostentatious. But it’s all certainly fascinating to watch.
““ Guido Pellegrini