Film Review: I'm Not There

Knowing what I do about Bob Dylan, it's impossible to go into I'm Not There without some level of bias. I doubt this would be a film that would be loved by someone who doesn't already know, love, and understand (or at least think they understand) his work. There's no plot—it's not about Dylan so much as it is about who his fans think he is. It includes everything his songs touch on: the commonalities and misconceptions, ideas and suppositions, delusions and dreams, hallucinations and hopes one can experience and yet never fully understand.

Dylan Is, Quite Literally, Not There

There is no mention of Bob Dylan in the film. None of the characters, all of whom play Dylan during some period of his life, are actually named Bob Dylan. In the beginning, he's Woody Guthrie (an outstanding Marcus Carl Franklin) hopping trains and playing country and blues songs, telling tall tales to bums on box cars, talking much larger and more articulately than his age and size would indicate. He's an obnoxious ego maniac who seems stuck in another era, indeed in someone else's ego altogether.

He goes from there to a press conference, claiming to be Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), talking to the camera in Dylan quotes. He chain smokes as his eyes dodge the camera, refusing to call himself a poet or folksinger. Then, he's Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett)—the most remarkably Dylanesque character of the film. In this persona, he romps with the Beatles, parties with an Edie Sedgewick-like gal named Coco, dodges reporters and mocks their questions.

Then he's the greatest folksinger of them all, named Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), singing "A Pawn in Their Game" in a field in the south, smeared across every magazine and billboard.

There's Robbie (Heath Ledger), a self-important actor who once played Rollins in a movie. Haunted by paparazzi, his personal life is a disaster. Finally, there's Billy the Kid (Richard Gere)—a chronic hallucinator and man of many names living in a town called Riddle, Missouri. But, nowhere does Dylan himself make an appearance.

A Series of Disconnected Moments

The film is entirely disjointed, jarring and non-cohesive. It almost starts to feel like it doesn't make any sense at all, until you remember you're watching a film about Bob Dylan—the man who wrote:

I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin,
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
...And its a hard rains a-gonna fall.

Indeed, most of Dylan's lyrics, taken out of context, don't make a whole lot of sense. But as one could imagine him asking, "What makes sense?"

Riddle is a town full of circus freaks, rebel soldiers, an exposed dead woman, ostriches and giraffes, a young "Woody Guthrie" and "Billy the Kid." It's the only place where two of the Dylanesque characters co-habit (the oldest and the youngest). It is, in fact, the one place where all the symbols and literary distractions begin to make the most sense by making little sense at all.

And Yet, It Works

I felt about this film kind of how I feel about most of Dylan's work, which is to say that I loved it even though I didn't understand it all. I think several viewings are necessary to really grasp the importance of every story line, but it still manages to get its point across. Still, I want to and probably will watch it again.

That said, I can recognize that I probably would've hated the film if it was about anyone other than Bob Dylan. Leave out the legend, the stories we know about the artist, and all you have is a disjointed bunch of self-righteous vignettes, some of them rather cliche (Blanchett's Jude Quinn with Allen Ginsberg, dancing around, yelling things like, "Why don't you do your early stuff?" at a statue of Christ on the cross).

If it were a film about a fictional character, it would not have worked. So, perhaps, the most important character in the film is the perception of Bob Dylan held by the audience. In fact, that seems to be what the entire film is about—which is the same thing as a fictional character. But mostly, like Dylan's best work, it's a film about every contradiction and its innate possibilities. As narrator Kris Kristofferson ends the film: "You got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen."