Todd Hayne’s staggeringly brilliant new film, I’m Not There, is too dense a work for me to pin down completely (even after two viewings). For that reason, I will direct you to people who are more apt than me to write about its many complexities; J. Hoberman at the Village Voice deems it “the movie of the year,” while the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum shows a more restrained appreciation for the film. Finally, Larry Gross at Film Comment writes the most pointed piece on I’m Not There, one that is almost as articulate and daunting as the film itself.
As for my own personal responses to Hayne’s “Bob Dylan movie,” I have to say that I was floored. The first time around it was all too impressive—everything from the music, the set designs, the performances—to be truly appreciated. My second viewing proved to be all the more emotional; I was near tears for most of the film, in particular during Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid segment, as well as the Heath Ledger/Charlotte Geinsburg sequences, which are not only immaculately acted, but also call to mind everything from Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) in the modular depiction of housewife angst—which is, needless to say, not unfamiliar to Haynes; both Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002) deal with this theme in a more explicit form—to the lingering lyrics of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975), his most revelatory record.
In a film where six actors take a shot at some aspect of the man’s persona, I might venture to say that Cate Blanchett’s Dylan circa 1966 is the most exciting one to watch, though this might also have to do with the astounding strength of these sequences as a whole (Fellini references, David Cross and Michelle Williams playing Allen Ginsberg and Edie Sedgwick, respectively, etc.). Just so that I don’t leave out any Dylans, Ben Whishaw plays the poet on trial, Marcus Carl Franklin the rail-riding youngster impersonating Woody Guthrie, and Christian Bale the folk singer turned evangelist.
Although the extent to which you enjoy I’m Not There may have something to do with your interest in Dylan, I do feel it’s an important piece of work independent of its source. Like the other two American masterpieces of this past year—Quentin Tarantino’s grindhouse pastiche Death Proof and David Fincher’s obsessive portrait of a real-life serial killer Zodiac—Haynes takes as his inspiration a specific cultural artifact, and with the use of his formal and narrative chops turns it into a work that is at once relentlessly provocative but completely instinctive. That it ends with Dylan’s feverish “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” my own choice for the best song ever recorded, is what I like to call surplus value.
