I’M NOT THERE [R]

For the casual fan of the occasional Bob Dylan tune, Todd Haynes’ new movie I’m Not There will be an incomprehensible and unwatchable mishmash. But, for those of us who are life-long rabid fans of dear Bob, the movie is a wholly original, off-the-wall, witty and genius bit of filmmaking. But it’s too long. Clocking in at well over two hours in length, the film could easily lose half an hour of footage without harming it in any way.

The premise is that the movie is a biography of Dylan inspired by the music and many public personas that Dylan had created in his long and varied career. The film presents seven different phases of Dylan’s life. In each, he is played by different actors – each called by a different name, none of them being Bob Dylan:

•The Young Romantic Boy Dylan (1959-61, played by Marcus Carl Franklin) is a left-handed black youth named “Woody” who travels the countryside as a hobo, trading on the vague backstory that Dylan first presented to the media. When it was later revealed that he was in fact a middle class Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota who played piano with pop star Bobby Vee, I scratched my head and wondered what to make of it all. But like most things having to do with Dylan, one just accepts the facts and moves on.
•The Prophet Dylan (1962-64, Christian Bale), “Jack,” emerges from the Greenwich Village folk music scene to become the leader of the pack and so-called protest singer, a label that Dylan hated being stuck with. Julianne Moore plays a proxy Joan Baez singer who befriends the young ragamuffin boy and places him firmly beside her in the pop music spotlight pantheon from which Jack itches to escape.
•The Enigma Dylan (1965, Ben Whishaw) is named Arthur, whom we see mostly at press conferences trying to deal with the media who has cast him as the voice of his generation. Trying to cast himself as a young poet rebel like his poet rebel hero Rimbaud, Arthur chain smokes and answers in Dylan’s actual words from his many filmed press conferences from that seminal year.
•The Innovator Dylan (1966, Cate Blanchett) is a character named Jude Quinn in a stunning performance by Cate Blanchett who inhabits the infamous Dylan persona from the film Don’t Look Back with uncanny accuracy and humor. Jude is Dylan at the center of the pop culture universe unable to deal with his fame and notoriety and rapidly becoming emotionally and mentally unglued. These sections of the movie are also notable for a hilarious performance by sardonic comic David Cross as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
•The Restless Lover Dylan (1964-73, Heath Ledger) “Robbie,” chronicles the singer’s troubled marriage and various lovers against the backdrop of the war in Viet Nam.
•The Spiritualist Dylan (1979-81, Bale again), aka “Pastor John” tells the story of the years that Dylan fled from the public eye and reinvented himself (for a short time) as a born-again Christian preacher with a small, devoted congregation.
•The Lone Gun Dylan (1976 - current, Richard Gere), or “Billy” (a nod to one of Dylan’s few acting roles, in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) lives in self-imposed exile a small mining town in the Old West that is on the brink of disaster.

Without a predictable narrative storyline, the movie cuts back and forth between these many characters and, due to it’s extreme length, often loses it’s way and confuses just exactly who we’re watching and at what point in time. For anyone familiar with the ins and outs of Dylan’s career, the film includes all the high points and some of the low ones as metaphors and allegories. Director Haynes is too perverse to present anything directly, so Dylan’s film roles, album cover images and the many performer masks he wore on stage are all integrated into the film as background, foreground and set pieces. The movie is often spellbinding and visually inventive and Cate Blanchett is simply mind-boggling as Jude. Most of the soundtrack of Dylan songs are performed by the actors and other contributing artists with actual recordings of Dylan singing his songs woven throughout the movie (though the two-disc soundtrack is nearly all covers).

This film is unique because it’s the first where Dylan gave his permission for his likeness and music to be used, unlike in the recent Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl, with the Dylan role played beautifully by Hayden Christiansen, but Dylan’s name is never used because he reportedly was unhappy about how he would be portrayed. So if you are a fan of dear Bob’s then this film come highly recommended, with the warning that it is one or two vignettes too long. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy this enchanting vision by Todd Haynes, one of the most creative and imaginative filmmakers working today.••• –Howie Green

Howie Green is a Boston-based artist and painter whose portrait of rapper Biggie Smalls appears on the 2007 compliation album “Incredible.” He is a contributor to EdgeBoston.com, and is a self-described media slut who loves Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, ‘Star Wars’ and any movie where a car flies through the air, something big explodes and pretty people do nasty things.