I'm Not There

You can't blame Todd Haynes for trying. We live in an era of uber-plain biopics, linear dramas which follow iconic rock stars from their humble origins to mega-stardom, through trying drug addiction and back along the road to salvation. In the end, the performer is weathered but wiser—cue uplifting musical number, roll end credits. But Todd Haynes is no Taylor Hackford; he's a director whose career has been predicated upon challenging genre, whether he's whittling away at Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story (in the nearly impossible to find short Superstar) or tweaking Sirkian melodrama for the new millennium (in Far From Heaven).

With I'm Not There, Haynes takes on one of the music industry's most challenging and enigmatic figures—Bob Dylan—and structurally he raises a middle finger to the Rays of the biopic world. Enlisting six different actors to play Dylan, including an African-American teenager (Marcus Carl Franklin) and a woman (Cate Blanchett), Haynes strives to emphasize the film's fittingly vague tagline: "He is everyone; he is no one." He's not out to demystify the scratchy "Blowin' in the Wind" crooner's life thus far. Rather, Haynes wants to reveal hidden facets of Dylan's perplexing personality. For his effort the director gets props, but in execution he flunks big time.

The oft-recited Gertrude Stein line, "there is no there there" might as well be reassigned to describe Haynes' film. Walking away from I'm Not There, you feel exhausted but not enlightened in the least, and, above all else, frustrated as hell. Haynes' approach could have succeeded had a solid through line been established to string together the sextet's different episodes. Instead, the dissimilar story lines don't hold together and most of them lack individual merit, too.

Take Christian Bale's Jack Rollins, for example, the reclusive "Troubadour of Conscience" iteration of Dylan that spearheads the folk music movement. Bale's superior acting skills go to waste here, where he mainly appears in dull performance sets spliced in between faux-documentary footage. The doc interviewees do more talking than Bale—like Julianne Moore's Joan Baez-inspired character, for instance—but they speak in dry generalities that divulge little about Rollins at all.

I'm Not There's shining standouts are Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett, playing troubled family man Robbie Clark and Jude Quinn, a reluctant celebrity modeled after Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, respectively. The dynamic between Clark and his neglected wife, Claire (a luminescent Charlotte Gainsbourg), captures the unease of a marriage gone sour, with both actors subtly emoting the gulf that fame often breeds. Blanchett, meanwhile, simply is Dylan, nervous tics, unexpected sex appeal and all, and she was deservedly Oscar-nominated for her work.

Sadly, such top-notch performances don't deliver the film to excellence. Overall, it suffers from a barely developed script, depressing and dull pacing, and, by the time Richard Gere's Billy the Kid episode rolls around, the movie fully declines into muddled territory. Die hard Dylan fan or not, I'm Not There won't teach you much about the influential pop-culture phenom, factually, symbolically, or otherwise. Its plot threads are frayed, its story orbit cast far too wide for the medium. Don't feel guilty if you don't "get" this grandiose art experiment—"It Ain't [You] Babe," it's the movie.

—Heidi Atwal
05.02.08