Bob Dylan's Many Faces
The music biopic is a genre that's so overly familiar and so frequently addled with clichés it's more than ripe for parody.
(Look no further than the Judd Apatow-produced comedy "Walk Hard:
The Dewey Cox Story," coming out later this winter.)
And so you have to at least appreciate that director and co-writer Todd Haynes is trying to do something bold and innovative as he takes on the tempestuous topic of Bob Dylan's life with "I'm Not There."
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If it sounds pretentious, that's probably because it is. Not a complete failure, mind you, but an admirably ambitious letdown.
Dylan fiends will have a field day scouring the movie for minutiae (a pair of sunglasses, a line he murmurs at a news conference). But casual fans, as well as those who know next-to-nothing about him, will walk away with the nagging sensation that he's as enigmatic a figure as ever.
Maybe that's Haynes' point: that there is no way to truly understand someone who has been so complex and yet so influential for so long. But it's not exactly a satisfying way to spend more than two hours of your life.
Haynes showed an obsessive purity of vision with "Far From Heaven" (2002), his vibrant homage to the 1950s' women's picture which appeared on many critics' top-10 lists (including this one's). With "I'm Not There," he ventures to the opposite extreme: The film is fragmented, a reflection of the myriad changes Dylan willed upon himself, a cubist experiment tied together only by the cohesive thread of his music.
Among the first depictions of Dylan from Haynes and his co-writer and old friend Oren Moverman ("Jesus' Son") is that of a skinny, chain-smoker who calls himself Arthur, as in Rimbaud, and who answers questions about his beliefs from unspecified accusers. He's played by Ben Whishaw ("Perfume"), and while he's meant to serve as the de facto narrator, he's the one who provides the least information of all.
Young Franklin's portrayal is one of the most compelling because he's such a tremendous natural talent, and because he's the only one among all the actors who's doing his own singing. The 11-year-old calls himself Woody, as in Guthrie, and he rides the rails in the 1950s, winning over strangers with his songs and his precocious charm.
Next comes Christian Bale as the early-'60s, protest singer-songwriter version of Dylan. He's known as Jack, and we see him through performances, fake documentary footage and interviews with folk contemporaries and scholars. ("Far From Heaven" star Julianne Moore functions as a sort of Joan Baez figure.)
Bale also appears later on as the converted-Christian Dylan, Pastor John, and while there's always something intriguing about his screen presence, there simply isn't enough of it.
Heath Ledger is sexy and smoldering as always as Robbie, an actor and singer who plays Jack in a film biography. His story line includes a 10-year relationship with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a French painter he meets in a Greenwich Village coffee shop who becomes his wife and the mother of his two daughters. (They have spirited sex soon after meeting to Dylan's "I Want You.") But ultimately their marriage parallels the deterioration of the Vietnam War.
The casting of Blanchett may sound gimmicky but she's riveting to watch: lanky, androgynous, jittery, evasive and combative. She's repeatedly shown she can immerse herself in any part. Why not have her play Dylan? You quickly forget you're watching a woman playing a man, and she almost makes you wish she'd been cast as the singer throughout - especially when the final Dylan comes.
"I'm Not There" turns downright insufferable with Gere as
Billy, as in Billy the Kid, a nod to several of Dylan's inspirations and incarnations. Here, he's become a recluse with his beloved dog in quaint Riddle, Mo., where the townsfolk dress as if they're actors pretending to live the simple life on the plains in some sort of fetishistic re-enactment.
By this point you're likely to be asking, where is he going with this? Any curiosity Haynes may have generated with the novelty of his approach is just not there.
"I'm Not There," a Weinstein Co. release, is rated R for
language, some sexuality and nudity. Running time: 135 minutes. Two
stars out of four.
By Christy Lemire