I'm Not There (2007)

(Why is this a production still if it never happens in the movie?)

I enjoyed "I'm Not There," even if it got a little tiring. Bob Dylan is the most elusive figure in rock n' roll history, and any attempt to bring him to the screen will probably have you stumbling somehow. Director Todd Haynes tries to renovate this by splitting his life into six different characters (none of them named Bob Dylan), all played by different actors. What he comes up with is a movie that, through its kaleidoscopically dense narrative, manages to say absolutely nothing about Bob Dylan that you wouldn't know already, and will confound anybody with little more than a passing interest in the man and his myth. Because none of the characters have anything in common with each other, it leaves the audience with nothing to grasp onto, and ends exactly where it began.

But that was probably the point. "I'm Not There" is a fan's movie, a spot-the-reference field trip through loopholes of persona that never really seem to mesh or intertwine. But did you really expect them to? It's filled with impressive cinematography and memorable montages (all set to classic or bootleg Dylan's songs), and makes for a highly entertaining experience, but it's ultimately a hollow shell of a film. You can get more out of listening to an entire Dylan album than watching it.

The problem with assuming six different characters are all playing one person is that you can never feel for them directly. You're at a distance, because once you get a sense of how one character works, the film shifts to a completely different one. Again, perhaps that was the point, but how is the audience supposed to connect to the material? The montages are the best parts of the film because we hear the Dylan songs we know well and love, but what about the movie? What's the point? I also felt that the movie could easily have been a half hour shorter or longer if Haynes really wanted it to be. For a movie that pretty much runs around in its own world with little (if any) substance, adding or subtracting certain scenes wouldn't really make a difference.

It's hard to really talk about the movie specifically other than the performances, because it's so self-reflexive and glossy that there's nothing more to say about it once it's out of your system. Watching these actors attempt to embody Dylan is like watching actors try to embody Dylan. You laugh at Cate Blanchett because of how hard she tries to match Dylan's mannerisms, and how Christian Bale seems like a parody of Dylan, but they never really amount to more than that. It's hard to find the nuances in the characters, and you can't just fit them all together like pieces in a puzzle.

But if you're a fan of Bob Dylan, it's certainly worth seeing, if only that you'll have the illusion of being enlightened for 2 and a half hours. "I'm Not There" is a case where a director takes a pretentious concept and makes it watchable, if only for a select group of people, if only to further celebrate the myth of Bob Dylan, and if only because somebody had to try.

Grade: B-