Io non sono qui

I saw this yesterday at my local art-house cinema, with my grandparents who were young when Bob Dylan was 'big' (is my lack of knowledge about Dylan already showing? Oh dear), and I have to say, I'm glad I was there - even if Bob Dylan wasn't.

The much-publicised, overly re-hashed concept driving the film is this: Dylan is portrayed by six actors of different races, ages and genders, none of whom are named Dylan, but represent aspects of his personality and life story. Every art-house buff will squeal at this delightfully off-kilter concept (well, except that it's been done before) - but never used so cleverly I'll admit. But, the cleverness of the concept only remains clever if it is executed well. This is where most people have a problem with the film.

Most of what you may have read in reviews is correct. The film is challenging, borderline plot-less (unless you are generally acquainted with Dylan's life) and seems muddled (again, only if you don't have a general knowledge of his life). For anyone who can't grasp the basic, "each actor represents a stage etc." concept, this film will be lost on them completely... because it gets even more complicated! The film is so layered, with hidden in-jokes, and snippets of real quotes from songs and interviews with Dylan used as dialogue, and story lines within story lines. A great example is Heath Ledger's character: Ledger (an actor), plays an actor, playing Jack Rollins in a biopic, who is the representation of folk-singer-Dylan (a stage). An actor in a biopic playing an actor in a biopic about a singer representing Bob Dylan played by an actor in a biopic. The self-parody is just hilarious in this film.

To add to these 'layers', each actor's "stage" that they represent is filmed in a distinctive cinematic style, for example, the Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn representing Bob Dylan sequence is shot in lush black and white. Haynes relishes this opportunity to show off, and he does. The film is stylistically stimulating, even if it does drag sometimes for ignoramuses like me who know literally nothing about Bob Dylan.

For those questioning the film's intentions as a biopic, I should think it was really obvious! The opening credits give a huge clue, as the main title comes up in stages: "I", "He", "I'm he", "I'm her", "Not her", "Not here", "I'm not there".

The film is like a dream: you come out of it with this vague (exact details in the film are scarce) and vivid impression of Dylan's personality, without learning anything. The title is certainly relevant - Haynes' actually conceals Dylan in this film! This biopic is conventional in the way it still presents a chronological life story if you arrange it all together and remember the actors represent one person, but it is different in the way it doesn't try to make a real person into a character for a film. This is really the only way to represent someone - by not.

This film is composed of stories and individual representations and metaphors that describe a person's life, their attitudes at points in time and aspects of their personality, but gives us nothing. Absolutely nothing.

So, if you're ready to put the level of effort and concentration required to appreciate and maybe like the film, go for it. But I was not prepared for this film and I wish I'd read a biography before I saw it. That said, not knowing anything did help in a way, as after we had several questions about events in the film and their basis in reality. After all, the trailer had told us that stories were exaggerated, fictionalised, imagined and true. It inspired me enough to look him up on Wikipedia (I know, such dedication!).

The performances are all generally good. Blanchett, Bale and Franklin impressed me the most. Blanchett only falls short because of her voice, but she has the accent correct, and she can't change her voice that much! She became more believable as the film progressed. Charlotte Gainsbourg is also quietly moving in her role as the neglected wife of Ledger's character.

My final opinion is that the film is well executed, but only once you've had time to ruminate on it, research Dylan and hear the director's thoughts on his own work. I read a great deal of reviews as well that helped me to understand (not that I didn't like the film initially; I liked it after I saw it anyway). Appreciation builds the more I learn about the film and the intricate connections between it and it's un-subject.

That said, should a film be this much hard work just to like? Not for some people, but for others, the effort is worth it. It does eventually pay off, but it's exhausting.

This was the semantically richest and emotionally deepest film experience I have had in years. And since I am different now that I was five years ago, it could qualify as near my favorite. It will likely not be so for you, at least to approach the way I did. It seems that you have to be my age, and have lived through the events the wrap this. Also, you have to have invested some part of your personal poetry in that of this man. And finally, you have to be sufficiently cineliterate to follow the amazing shape of the eye-concepts that are serially birthed.

Often I say that essentially all films are about other films, rarely reaching life. This does that, reaching life, but by going through, punching through art by force. It presents a collage of images in such a way that we can see through the space in them to truth. Its an amazing feat. But in order for it to work, you have to have those patches sparkle for you.

So for instance you have to have internalized Fellini's one masterpiece, and be yearning for decades to escape the now close confines of the imagination set then. Of course when it was new, it was a wild ramble in the jungle, but now turn to tethers in the park. You really have to chafe at what passes for cinematic art, and dream of the next film, the one that will do for us what "8 1/2" did then.

You also have to have lived through the blasphemy of the Vitenam war and ideally have been on the "right side" throughout and still bear the pain of it. You have to – seriously, even though the director is too young for this — have had your life ruined by the revelation of a lying government, coupled with the spinning parade of false hopes from artists, many of whom we still admire. You have to have built your life taking into account mistrust.

But you also have to have had this particular dancer as a focus. This man who split into so many men, most of whom were designed to charm, all of whom weren't men at all but crystallized paths to salvation. You have to have invested in a few of these paths yourself enough so that it cost you more than it ever could Dylan.

If you have all of these traits then you already have the web on which this tarantula dances. And this will seep into you like some exotic solvent carrying subtle hallucinogens. And it will haunt you forever. Oh, you'll be able to slough it off and pretend that this is merely a clever puzzle of kinematic trivia. But this will hurt. It will hurt a lot, but only because of memories now defused.

It will make you soar as well, because it is so massively glorious. Many Dylans, well of course. Different ages, races, sexes. My, surely true.

Stories about films of one in another, about hiding from each other, about having sex with and spatting with each other. About disowning, and writing about each other. About one being another's blood, who is the hidden eyebrow of another in a Joycean web, but one that makes sense because it is made out of the stuff that made us.

What impresses me so much is that even before this was conceived the filmmaker had to know something like this fabric of selves existed. And he had to — without having lived it himself — develop deep intuitions about how this specific soul danced upon us in music and images. He had to understand how to borrow and bend those images with the music in ways that would make Julie Taymor blush: "Thin Man" used not for confused sexual tension but the conflating of superficial dylanology with artistic expiration. "Pat Garrett" as the context for a world rather than the escape from one. Over and over again the juxtapositions of life events, image and music (often performed by others in strange deviations) are all wrong but so right.

And then this artist had to see it all cinematically, to send it directly into our soul. I suppose this is a particularly broad leap because of the disconnected way this must have been made.

I celebrate this. You might wonder if it worked for someone, somewhere. It sure did for me.

Cate understands the whole enterprise, from the outside, all the way through every layer. What a soul!

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

Haynes' adventurous biopic of Bob Dylan, which uses six actors of both sexes and several races ranging in ages from 11 to 50, is both exhausting and fun to watch. It's also hard to describe. But let's start with those six and the characters or facets they portray. Arthur (Ben Whishaw) is the Dylan who incarnated Rimbaud and serves as a kind of narrator whom we see smoking and giving ironic answers to some kind of inquisition sporadically throughout the film. Woody (the wonderful young Marcus Carl Franklin, an amazing a singer and actor) is a precocious rail-hopper with a guitar (labeled like the real Woody's, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS) and tall tales that start with his claim that he's Woody Guthrie. Woody's scenes show him rescued by a black family and a white family and performing with country black musicals. He represents the early shape-shifting Dylan in search of an identity and telling a lot of lies along the way.

Jack (Christian Bale) is the Dylan who became a hit in Greenwich Village and went into the South and sang "The Ballad of Hattie Carroll" and other protest "folk songs,"-the high-profile "political" Dylan who spearheaded a movement and became famous with his brilliant early LP's. But Jack doesn't want to be typecast and "betrays" his adoring public and his lover and folksinging champion Alice (Julianne Moore), a Joan Baez stand-in seen in later "interviews." Jack disappears and his place is taken by Robbie (Heath Ledger), a young actor in New York who becomes famous for starring in a 1965 film depicting the vanished Jack. Robbie meets Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in a Village coffee shop and falls in love, and a turbulent ten-year marriage follows, winding up painfully at the time of the Vietnam War's end.

If Jack represents the cast-off early style and Robbie represents Dylan's family life, Jude (Cate Blanchett) is Dylan the artist, quintessentially as seen in the mid-to-late Sixties when he toured England (an event notably chronicled by two Leacock-Pennebaker documentaries)-and shocked his audiences, some of whose members felt betrayed and shouted "Judas!", when he shifted from solo guitar and harmonica to more personal songs with loud rock accompaniment. Jude's segments are partly borrowed from Pennebaker, but largely consist of gorgeous black and white scenes deliberately and "churlishly" (Haynes' word) imitative of Fellini's 8 ½.

Jude's new style is admired by Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) and underground groupie Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams) and he becomes internationally famous. But he continues to be misunderstood by the protest music old guard and conventional journalists like the British TV host Mr. Jones (Bruce Greenwood)-who's incorporated into a music video for Highway 61 Revisited's "Ballad of a Thin Man": ". . .something is happening here /And you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones." . .

Jude and Arthur articulate the early Dylan's challenging, ironic stance to the public, but Jude is exhausted on tour and his nihilism leads him to an existential crisis.

He's reborn symbolically in Pastor John (Christian Bale again), who's moved to Stockton twenty years later and become a born-again preacher, singing his own gospel songs. Finally the last version of Dylan appears in Billy (Richard Gere), in full retreat from the world till threats to destroy his town of Riddle cause him to enter public life again. This sequence evokes a Sixties historical western in which Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood) is a character.

This is only the barest outline of the two-and-a-quarter-hour film, in which various "Dylan's" are woven in and out. Maybe the reason why I found Woody's sequences delightful and Billy's colorful but wearying has to do with the latter's coming two hours later. But Gere and his sequences evoke Dylan less well and are puzzling to interpret. Blanchett's in contrast are, of course, the most conventionally straightforward. She's the only one who successfully mimics the physical appearance and the speaking voice of the artist (unless Whishaw does a better job with the voice). But Blanchett's mimicry is intentionally undercut (and the biopic conventionality of films like Ray avoided) by having Jude be played by a woman-which was planned by Haynes in his screenplay before he even chose his actor.

The method Haynes has chosen avoids cliché. This is still a biopic, but it's a sophisticated one; and the fractured portrait is well justified by the nature of its subject. Dylan has always been a shape-shifter; some of his permutations were left out, such as the period of the orthodox Jew and JDL supporter. But it's intelligent to see Dylan the man, the husband, the artist, the political being, and the religious being as completely separate entities because no simple biopic sequence can really dramatize the complexity of such an artist and such a protean existence. Haynes' film makes you think about biography itself, as well as giving imaginative shape to aspects of Bob Dylan no non-fiction account can really provide.

Maybe it's the daringly experimental methodology that led Dylan himself, approached through his eldest son Jesse, to grant Haynes both the musical rights and the biographical rights. Haynes has chosen a multifaceted and original way of using Dylan's songs. Only Franklin actually performs them with his own voice. Otherwise the soundtrack mixes original Dylan recordings with existing covers, new ones by people as widely various as Ritche Havens, Iggy Pop, John Doe and Sonic Youth, and other music, including, appropriately for the 8 ½- esque sequences, Nino Rota. There is a voice-over narration by Kris Kristofferson. Haynes worked on the screenplay for years, and then collaborated with Oren Moverman.

Not for mainstream audiences or be prime Oscar bait, but a challenging, fun watch.

Shown in the press screenings of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2007. Haynes was present for a Q&A afterward with J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, which revealed that the director is an intelligent and articulate man who knows his Dylan.

Unless you know something about the subject of this biography, you're bound to be confused by "I'm Not There". It is "inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan." For the unenlightened, Mr. Dylan was famous, long ago ("for playing electric violins on desolation row"). The film, by writer/director Todd Haynes is excellent, but inaccessible. And, strangely, if you know anything about the subject, you're going to learn approximately nothing knew. To help navigate, there were four main Dylans…

FIRST and famed-mostly, Dylan was a "Rock Star". This period is played out by Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn". This character sports a fictitious name, but like much of the movie, comes (not from McCartney's "Jude" but) obviously from Dylan's oeuvre - the Christian "Jude" and "Quinn the Eskimo". This Dylan has the clearest Beginning and End points of any. He was "born" when startling his folk audience by "going electric" (guitar) and "dies" in a motorcycle accident at the peak of his fame.

SECOND most famous, and highly influential, Dylan was the "Folk Singer" replaced by the above. Here, it's Christian Bale as "Jack Rollins". This Dylan was quite popular on his own, but was much "covered" by other folk artists and rock bands. During this time, Dylan was more like a very big cult, and his songs were more widely heard when other people made hit records from them. The songs were more Political (protest) during this time, getting vague later (with exceptions, like "Hurricane").

THIRD time around for Dylan was his "Cowboy" persona, essayed herein by Richard Gere and named "Billy the Kid" after the outlaw anti-hero Dylan play-acted. This was the Dylan emerging after the motorcycle accident. Dylan left a bunch of unreleased tracks (known as "The Basement Tapes") and "reinvented" himself as a more countrified mellow rocker (listen to "Lay Lady Lay"). Here, the "stages" of Dylan's art become more blurred as he no longer commanded the attention he did earlier.

FOURTH biggest change, after a long run without defining boundaries, was the "Born Again" or "Christian" Dylan. This startled some people, but (as the film points out) it shouldn't have been unexpected. In fact, the "Fame"/"Drugs"/"Jesus" continuum is very common among music stars, as anyone watching MTV's 1990s biographies could plainly see. For this film, Mr. Bale (uniquely) plays two Dylan incarnations, revising his earlier "Folk Singer" character "Jack Rollins" to become "Pastor John".

BUT, that's not all. There are three less public parts of the quadraphonic Dylan covered by Mr. Haynes…

FIRST is Dylan's mysterious boyhood masquerade as "Woody Guthrie" played by Marcus Carl Franklin. He is the kid on the train, sporting the Fascist-Killing-Guitar-in-the-West. Of course, Woody Guthrie was a real person, and he had a tremendous influence on Dylan. While cute and well done, this section is not revelatory, which could be why the film project had "the real" Bob Dylan's blessing. The real Dylan, who appears briefly near the end, did not appreciate biographers peeking into his personal history.

SECOND is Dylan "The Poet" named "Arthur Rimbaud" and played by Ben Whishaw. Like the above, but more of a conglomerate, the character is a real French poet named Arthur Rimbaud who influenced Dylan (and many other rock stars). The Dylans are presented in sort of an overlapping chronological order - which may not make sense to the uninitiated - but this one is used more like a muse for the others, accentuating Dylan's reputation as a true "Tarantula" of a Poet, even without the music.

THIRD and perhaps most esoteric is Dylan "The Actor" played by Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark". Dylan did do some movies. Mortals do not forgive. Even an epic focusing in his relationship with a certain sad-eyed of the lowlands. Rather than show Dylan acting in a movie, this "Actor" section perversely shows the more camera-shy Dylan. It seems highly fictitious, but you've got to appreciate "Dylan" telling what looks like "Patti Smith", "chicks can never be poets." (!) And, "I Want You" is a terrific vignette.

In sum, "I'm Not There" is an excellent film for obvious believers, with minus zero insight into its subject. Bobby Zimmerman could hardly disapprove. By the way, the fact that the vinyl "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the…" was amusingly continued in the "Blonde on Blonde" gate-fold jacket as "…Memphis Blues Again" is no excuse to edit the song. And, changing the lyric, "Here is your 'throat' back, thanks for the loan..." to "Here is your 'mouth' back, thanks for the loan..." really sucks. Moreover, it's sacrilege.

******* I'm Not There (9/3/07) Todd Haynes ~ Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere

This movie can be difficult to follow if you are not familiar with Bob Dylan, but it is in fact a carefully and lovingly crafted tribute, that aims to reflect the essence of the artist's work and life. It is a fun take on its subject, though in order to be fully appreciated, one has to know what is being explored. Otherwise, it may seem a tedious watch, but perhaps that is appropriate as in order to fully appreciate Bob Dylan, one has to pay attention, and then it becomes quite rewarding. The shape-shifting nature of Bob Dylan has been portrayed, quite fittingly, by several actors of various backgrounds, ages, sexes and races - in that respect, it is as original and unexpected as its subject. All in all, an interesting, artistic and original but perhaps somewhat inaccessible - to an uninitiated viewer - tribute to one of the greatest artistic geniuses Americana has ever reared.