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While not the biggest fan of Bob Dylan, a lot of his songs are great (especially in the lyric writing) and he has an immediately distinctive voice, he is a musician who is appreciated highly by me and it is easy to recognise his importance.

'I'm Not There', regardless of having a talented big name cast, generally didn't do much for me. It is interesting sure, with a unique and quite bold concept, but it doesn't come off completely successfully. There are things to appreciate but it is understandable why some may dislike it, it's pretty divisive as a film.

Starting with 'I'm Not There's' good points, it is beautifully and atmospherically made and adeptly directed by Todd Haynes. Dylan's music is just great and beautifully incorporated and interpreted.

A big strength is the cast, a vast majority of them giving strong performances. Cate Blanchett, barely recognisable, is particularly excellent, with Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin and Heath Ledger more than up to her level. There are some entertaining secondary performances from Charlotte Gainsbourg, David Cross and Julianne Moore. Dylan is remarkably multi-faceted, where we see him as a rebellious poet, a protest singer, a drug-addled rock star, a matinée idol with marriage woes, and a born-again Christian.

Not everything works. The concept does intrigue, but the time shifts do feel muddled and confusing. 'I'm Not There' is overlong with it going longer than necessary and the pacing rambles making the film drag.

While most of the cast are great, Richard Gere and his story are tacked on and uninteresting and Ben Whishaw is a little dull. The script could have been tighter and more cohesive.

Overall, not awful but underwhelming and easy to see why it's a divisive film. Bob Dylan deserved better than this. 5/10 Bethany Cox

If you are thinking about seeing this movie I would suggest that you research Dylan first; otherwise you will be lost from the get-go, like I was.

You need to know that the characters all represent different aspects of Dylan, and that even though they are "Dylan" they have different names. Some of the Dylan aspects are personified as a young black boy using the name Woody Guthrie, a woman, and a middle-aged Billy the Kidd, for example. And the film jumps from character to character and then back again, frequently.

Chances are, if you are not an art film aficionado, you won't care for this one. On the other hand, if you do your Dylan homework, you may very well enjoy it even though it isn't typical mainstream movie fare.

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.

To appreciate I’m Not There., you need to fully buy into its somewhat-implausible premise; in it, six actors represent various aspects of Bob Dylan throughout his many decades in the limelight. If you buy into this premise, then this is a unique, thoughtful perspective of an almost-unknowable individual, a man who famously played things close to the vest, a man who shunned introspection. But if you don’t immediately buy into this premise, then the movie just feels like a long experiment that isn’t entirely successful, and in the end you don’t feel you know much more about the man, the myth, the legend than you knew going in. Which might be the point, who’s to say? And that’s sort of where I land on the whole I’m Not There. issue.

Here’s one big problem right off the bat. The six various characters, each representing part of Dylan, have different names. Some of them are named after real-life people, like Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud. Some have fictitious names, like Jude Quinn (an amalgam of Jude from “Hey Jude” and Dylan’s own “The Mighty Quinn”), Jack Rollins, and Robbie Clark - the latter being an actor playing one of the aspects in a movie. And then it gets confusing.

The first gimmick for this movie is that each aspect is played by an actor you wouldn’t expect to see playing Dylan. Okay, maybe not all of them, but some of them. Cate Blanchett is one. She’s female, in case you were unsure, and she is by far the best Dylan in the movie. She plays Jude, the latter-day, peeved-at-everyone Dylan. Another is Marcus Carl Franklin, who plays “Woody Guthrie” - here, a young version of Dylan, riding the rails across the Midwest. Franklin is African American. Then there’s Heath Ledger and Christian Bale, who are Australian (as is Blanchett) and Welsh, respectively. The problem with those, though, is that the only difference between them and the real Dylan is Dylan’s particular linguistic tendencies, so you wind up with just some guys acting Dylanesque. You know, the perpetual cigarette dangling precariously, the hat, the whole nine yards.

It would have been more effective, for me, if each of the aspects was played by completely different looking people - because in order for them to be identifiable as Dylan, they would have to sound like him. Otherwise you’re left with some folk-singing iconoclast who’s rebelling against everyone, and you don’t know why. So there’s one issue. And that would have been a clever, but not too-clever, way for each supposed aspect or time period to be represented. Even if two aspects were on the screen simultaneously, big deal - at least we could tell who was who.

But added to this gimmick is the fact that some non-Dylan characters - and some situations - are based on real-life people, like Allen Ginsburg, and retain their counterparts’ names, and others are clearly supposed to be real people but have … different names. And some situations definitely did occur (such as Dylan’s getting booed at the Newport festival, a huge turning point for him), but did all of them? Were any of them made up to highlight that particular aspect of his personality? One of the characters is Arthur Rimbaud. No, not the poet, he just has that name. Anyway, the entirety of his screen time is spent giving testimony or something to officials (or a jury, I’m not sure). And his speeches are of the deep philosophical sort, the kind that Dylan was apparently fond of - ways to get into people’s minds, but I’m not sure what the soliloquies add in terms of exposition and revelation.

Then there’s also Richard Gere, who plays Billy the Kid, another “aspect” of Dylan. Apparently here Billy is mythologized as this hiding loner at the end of his career, just sort of like Dylan, only Dylan’s not even now at the end of his career, unless he keels over tomorrow, or something. Gere’s good, and I don’t say that often, but I think the aspect, such as it is, is too abstract and unreadable to be worthwhile.

The intermittent narrator (Kris Kristofferson) is marginally helpful; perhaps he could have been used to tie all these aspects together. Instead we get two hours of ego feeding and idol worship. To me, though, it felt more like idle worship than anything else, a waste of time even if you’re willing to grasp whatever deep insights the film pretends to offer to you.

Todd Haynes ("Velvet Goldmine", "Far from Heaven") created a non-linear, truly original film, that must be seen by every Bob Dylan lover. Haynes's tapestry is "inspired by the music and lives of Bob Dylan" - he introduces us to 6 different Dylans: Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) and Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), interweaving their stories in a groundbreaking narrative slightly similar to Todd Solondz's unsettling, caustic "Palindromes" (2004), in which several very different actresses (and a boy) play a 13 year-old pregnant girl.

While "Across the Universe" illustrated The Beatles' fantastic songs with simple, adorable characters in a psychedelic rhythm, but with little character development (not that I'm complaining: I absolutely love to see visual masters like Baz Luhrmann or Julie Taymor on fire, since their self-indulgence creates wonderful sensorial pieces), "I'm Not There" is much more complex: it's deeper than conventional biopics ("Ray", "Walk the Line"), and much smarter than exploitative flicks (the atrocious "Factory Girl"). Haynes crafted a unique film that's a feast for the eyes (thanks to cinematographer Ed Lachman, "The Virgin Suicides", who also co-directed the disgusting "Ken Park" with Larry Clark), ears (Dylan's music is always a pie in the sky) and mind (it'll make you admire the man even more, and it doesn't even need to be an ass-kissing biopic to succeed on that).

The cast is heterogeneous and solid, but I think critics are overrating Cate Blanchett for the sheer fact that she's playing a man (which makes things more challenging for her, indeed), when she's not really better than most of the cast; a good performance for sure, but I was much more impressed by Christian Bale and the young revelation Marcus Carl Franklin. Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Michelle Williams play some important women from Dylan's life, and the always underrated Bruce Greenwood has a small but interesting part. All in all, this isn't a film that will enjoy big commercial success, and it's probably too artsy (although, not in a bad way) to get the Academy's top prize (even though Blanchett's performance and, maybe, Haynes's magnificent directing/writing, will probably be remembered), but it's a real gem for those who want to see something really exciting and original. As for myself, I'm thankful to Haynes and his audacious, faithful producer Christine Vachon (this woman rocks, and in a perfect world, she'd have all the money that a certain Jerry Bruckheimer possesses), who always dare to blow us away - something rare, these days. Fascinating. 10/10.