I'm Not There

Throughout I'm Not There, I was distracted by the music. If for nothing else, the film ought to be commended for making viewers want to listen to Dylan.

Otherwise, the film was hit and miss, nothing too profound in terms of insights into Dylan's character. For that, Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home does a fine job. In No Direction Home, Dylan himself seems mystified at how he could have embodied so many different selves, and in this respect Dylan is just like the rest of us, negotiating through different personas at different moments of our lives, only Dylan's grappling with different versions of himself is (literally and figuratively) amplified--and Dylan just happens to be the genius who reinvented American popular music for his time. My own favorite Dylan is the cynical, disillusioned folkie (or perhaps ex-folkie) of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde--Dylan as the master ironist whose cutting remarks spare no one, not even himself. In I'm Not There, it is Cate Blanchett who somewhat improbably--but to great effect--takes on this role.

I can never tell if Cate Blanchett is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen or one of the plainest. Regardless, she excels at playing a self-absorbed 1960s Dylan-esque asshole. Some of the other performances were intriguing or endearing, but Heath Ledger's 70s asshole Dylan ("Robbie Clark") made me want to run from the theater. There wasn't anything compelling about his louche debauchery or his casual affairs or about the Hollywood schlock that, supposedly, had torn him away from music and propelled him into a life of hollowness and vacancy devoid of any redeeming artistic quality sufficient to save him from himself. The gradual dissolution of his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) was too gradual for me: I couldn't wait for them to split and get it over with. I didn't sympathize. It seemed like we had seen this sort of thing done so many times already in other films, sometimes to much better effect, and the fact that its purpose in this film was to say something about Dylan wasn't enough.

Marcus Carl Franklin's turn as a black kid self-identified as "Woody Guthrie" ticks off some interesting interpretations of what Sasha Frere-Jones termed "musical miscegenation" in a recent New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones), and it's hard not to like Franklin when he's up there on screen. Richard Gere's "Billy the Kid"/Dylan doesn't do much except to add some interesting imagery, though Jim James' performance of "Goin' to Acupulco" during this segment is powerful, probably the best of all the Dylan covers to grace the movie soundtrack.

We admire the noble failure, and for me at least I'm Not There qualifies as such, though in the future I would appreciate more of the nobility and less of the failure.