Straight to DVD

I'm Not There

Among the movie-watching sacrifices my wife Whitney and I have made since becoming parents is a massive reduction in films we would term "experimental." There was a time when we would show up at almost any such movie with good directorial or acting provenance (Macbeth set in Antarctica, with the witches dressed as penguins? Directed by Jarmusch? We're there!), on the theory that even the failures would contain something worth seeing. (I admit this wasn't always true, but it often was. Well, sometimes.)

Now, of course, our lack of time and general exhaustion leave us a little less patient with the genre; it takes something particularly intriguing to make it through the filter to our queue. I'm Not There is one such film, mostly on the strength of its director, Todd Haynes, whose work we've enjoyed since Safe and on through Far from Heaven (as noted earlier, I have a thing for Julianne Moore), but also because the idea itself—a Bob Dylan biopic in which six different actors play the legend—was just so unusual.

Actually, I'm Not There has a decent amount in common with Haynes's last venture into pop-music history, Velvet Goldmine, a reality-based yet quite fictional look at Bowie-era glam rock. This film shares Velvet Goldmine's intentionally jarring mix of real history with completely fabricated elements, but it goes further: There's no plot to speak of, and it's far less linear than its predecessor, jumping from period to period (and thus from lead actor to lead actor). We are quickly presented with young Dylan, portrayed by a young African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin); folkie Dylan (Christian Bale); the budding celebrity and bristling interview subject (Ben Whishaw); the downright bitter Dylan-gone-electric (Cate Blanchett); the failed-family-man Dylan, here converted to a celebrity actor (Heath Ledger); and an aged, Old West loner Dylan (Richard Gere). Each uses a different non-Dylan name, some cribbed from real people (Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud), others new inventions (Jude Quinn, Jack Rollins).

Haynes and his co-screenwriter, Oren Moverman, had a lot of great ideas when they were putting this movie together, but an awful lot of them get lost in the execution—it feels as if they've bitten off more than they can chew. Using a young African-American to encapsulate Dylan's mythologizing of his own past during his early days in the limelight, for instance, is brilliant—but much of Franklin's dialogue feels forced, even stereotypical. Similarly, Blanchett does an uncannily remarkable job of reproducing the Dylan of the documentary Don't Look Back—but if you've seen that movie, her scenes veer between amazing but pointless mimicry (some scenes are re-created almost verbatim) and moments of discovery that stick out like sore thumbs and never ring true.

The more broadly inventive sections of the film, like Ledger's Dylan-as-celebrity and Gere's withdrawn-old-man portions, are less hampered by this problem, but instead they just feel thin and a bit unconnected. Perhaps an entire feature film of just one of these sections would have given Haynes enough time to lay out the themes he wants to explore, but with just a sixth of the movie to work with, even an actor of Ledger's quality can't achieve much.

So while you begin watching I'm Not There with interest and even fascination, as you see where Haynes is trying to go, by midfilm a glaze has set in, as you realize he's not going to get there. The saving grace is the music—a combination of original Dylan and mostly excellent covers of his work by the likes of Sonic Youth, Eddie Vedder, Stephen Malkmus, and Calexico. When the film starts to bog down, that does give you time to reflect on just how remarkable Dylan's work and career have been. Unfortunately, even that wears off, and by the last half-hour I was honestly praying for this film to just end already. Haynes, as always, gives his audience a lot to think about, but the end result here just isn't enough to hold a tired parent.