I'm Not There

director: Todd Haynes
year: 2007


Bob Dylan expressed as seven characters: a Depression-obsessed black kid named Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), a cigarette-smoking "poet" (Ben Whishaw), a shy and folksy singer-songwriter (Christian Bale), Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), a cynical celebrity who marries then divorces a French artist (Heath Ledger), iconic Dylan goes electric (Cate Blanchett), and, finally, a born-again singin' Christian (Bale).


The editing's great, the cinematography's not bad (Haynes and co. flip through film stocks and styles like they're Oliver Stone and it's 1994) and I'm sure it's all good fun for Dylan fanatics. Unfortunately, even for them, it's mostly superficial, "spot-the-reference" kind of fun ("Look, that guy's selling postcards of the hanging!"). Almost like a game you play while driving down to Florida. Sure, Haynes cranks up the artificiality and aims at surfaces for a reason, but that reason wears itself out over 135 minutes, leaving the film indulging only in itself. It teases with political images like LBJ, Vietnam, and the Black Panthers—and pines for relevance ("Why, isn't that—my, yes, it is! That's Cate Blanchett... playing Bob Dylan! Oh, how transgressive and progressive for a woman to play a man! Todd Haynes, you LGBT rebel!), but it's aesthetics over politics all the way. And it's hard to get past the way the film plays like it's been made a bit too quickly, not carefully enough: cracks in its aesthetic shell; surfaces only work when they're not broken. It eschews spontaneity for precision, and then cuts with a dulled blade. Some critics love the film, others complain that it should have been more like Walk the Line or Ray. Truth is, it ain't much different from those two biopics: good music accompanied by pretty pictures.

I'm Not There is neither here nor there.