“I’m Not There” Review
Cate Blanchett portrays one of six avatars based upon Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There”, the music biopic from director Todd Haynes.
There are very few musician artists that have had the impact, talent, pathos and longevity as Bob Dylan. Whether it’s film, poetry, literature or, of course, music, Bob Dylan has been a constant in the American sonic landscape for over 60 years. But with a mysterious nature and secluded persona, it is nearly impossible to get a complete grasp of who Bob Dylan is as a person. Unlike other artists that try to have mystique, Dylan genuinely possesses this. I’ve read his books (including the autobiography “Chronicles Vol. 1”), listened to all of his records and even had the privilege to see him live and I’ve come to this conclusion just like so many before me: the only thing consistent about Bob Dylan is his inconsistency. Just when you think that he has permanently settled into a certain genre or lifestyle, he will shake things up in such a dramatic way but it’s never for the attention or scrutiny. It’s always for the art.
We’ve seen Bob Dylan as a folk balladeer, a psychedelic rock icon, a hermit, a sex icon, a family man, a preacher, a painter, a poet, a minstrel, a vagabond and countless other monikers which may be or may not be who he really is. To try to capture the essence of this man in a cinematic format would be extremely difficult but not impossible. Through the lens of documentary, Dylan has been well captured with contemporary works like “Don’t Look Back”, “Eat The Document” and a strong appearance as a performer in “The Last Waltz”. Dylan has also been retrospectively covered numerous times with the most exceptional films, “No Direction Home” and “Rolling Thunder Revue”, both being directed by Martin Scorsese.
However, very few filmmakers would even attempt to take on the daunting task of trying to take Dylan’s incredible life and distilling it into a musical biopic. That is until this year when “A Complete Unknown” began filming in New York City and New Jersey. Set in the early to mid-1960s, the film will star Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan as he moves to New York at the age of 19 to visit his dying idol Woody Guthrie and rises up through the folk scene only to alienate his fans by going electric. While much of the film is still shrouded, it appears to be an origin story of one of the true superheroes. The idea does have merit and a talented filmmaker James Mangold (whose pervious films have included “Girl, Interrupted”, “Logan”, “Ford V Ferrari” and Johnny Cash biopic “Walk The Line”) at the helm.
Nevertheless, I was still skeptical because I have become completely alienated from the formulaic Hollywood studio music biopic with recent efforts like “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and “Bob Marley: One Love” feeling lackluster and like they were produced on a conveyor belt. That was how I felt until I snuck onto the set when they were filming in New York City and got to see Timothée Chalamet in action. From his walk to his overall demeanor, it appears that Chalamet has perfected his portrayal and we can not only expect a great performance from him but a good film as well. However, “A Complete Unknown” still has pretty big shoes to fill considering that another Bob Dylan biopic already exists and, in my opinion, it is one of the finest biographical films to have ever been made. I am, of course, referring to the 2007 Todd Haynes film “I’m Not There”.
Just like now, the early to mid-2000s saw a surge of music biopics that promised box office success and prestigious accolades with films like “Ray”, “Walk The Line” and “La Vie En Rose” being stand out titles. While all of these films are excellent and do a good job capturing artists like Ray Charles and Edith Piaf as both creatives and people, there was a noticeable pattern emerging from the stories of these cradle-to-grave biopics. Fortunately, other filmmakers were aware of this too and were contributing films that could diversify the pool of music films. 2007 in particular was a strong year that saw the release of “Across The Universe”, which showcased the evolution of music by The Beatles in a jukebox musical set in the 1960s counterculture, and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”, which parodied the clichés of the music biopic on a level that mirrored satirical geniuses like Mel Brooks and the Zucker Brothers/Jim Abrahams. “I’m Not There” neatly fits into this wave too because, while a phenomenal biopic, it takes all of the narrative rules that are generally adhered to in a music biopic and breaks them. It’s insanely ironic that a film that never even says the name Bob Dylan manages to be the best cinematic depiction that we’ve ever seen so far.
(Clockwise from top left) The six avatars: Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), Billy The Kid (Richard Gere), Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) and Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw).
Instead of one actor playing Bob Dylan, the man is broken up into six avatars with each of them having their own stories. But all of these stories have strong connective tissue that elevates the story beyond a disjointed anthology. Through these six narratives and six people, we get to see an aspect of Bob Dylan’s character fully realized in a semi-fictional narrative. The film begins in 1966 with an androgynous rocker named Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) getting in a fatal motorcycle accident (just like how Bob Dylan was nearly killed in such an accident near Woodstock which caused him to retreat from a public life for many years). As Jude is laid to rest, a nameless voice (Kris Kristofferson) delivers a eulogy while listing off the other archetypes that this film is going to follow alongside Quinn: the “poet” Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), the “prophet” Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the “outlaw” Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), the “fake” Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) and the “star of electricity” Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger). After a rapidfire montage of these people, we meet Arthur Rimbaud (the film’s quasi-narrator) who gets the ball rolling.
While this concept might seem like an inaccessible arthouse film, once you understand who each of these avatars is supposed to represent, you realize that this is a pure Bob Dylan biopic. With each of the avatars being mainly introduced in chronological order (chronological in the sense of Dylan’s life story and not in the timeline that the film presents), you get to experience the life of Bob Dylan through these six people which is a brilliant artistic depiction of how people really are. Like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, this film understands that Bob Dylan, as well as most people, has evolved and changed as both a person and an artist. So, having multiple people play a facet of him works so well.
First, there’s Woody Guthrie, a young boy who roams the country on boxcars in 1959 as he spins many a yarn about his travels and songwriting. Eventually, after being told to write songs about his own time instead of singing about unions and other topics more relevant in the Dust Bowl, he makes his way to New Jersey where he visits the real Woody Guthrie (Garth Gilker) as he lays dying from Huntington’s Disease in a hospital. Marcus Carl Franklin is incredibly endearing as he balances a childlike eagerness with the airs of someone who has lived for decades as he talks about playing carnivals and joining the union cause.
Like Dylan’s own stories, Woody’s narrative is a mix of fact and fiction based on the truths and lies Bob Dylan told about his own origins. Like Woody says, Bob Dylan did play with Bobby Vee before his move to New York in the early 60s and he also did visit Woody Guthrie who was very much Dylan’s idol. Bob Dylan wanted to be like Woody Guthrie so much that he would tell fictitious tales of growing up in the boxcar and playing folk music across the country like his hero instead of being truthful of his relatively normal childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota. He killed Robert Zimmerman and birthed Bob Dylan. This is why Woody has an obvious alias as his name and why Kristofferson calls him a fake. It’s a representation of Bob Dylan as a young man that depicts the fable of Dylan and the true events that shaped his earliest love for music.
Next, to depict Dylan in two distinctly different eras of his musical career, is Christian Bale as Jack Rollins. Under the guise of a 1970s television news story that is a retrospective of his life, we see Rollins become one of the big voices of the folk movement with “finger pointing’”songs that are hailed for their conscience and messages. Eventually, by 1963/64, Rollins feels like folk music can’t affect any sort of change and completely abandons music not too long after angering his audience by giving a speech where he expresses a relatability with Lee Harvey Oswald (something Dylan actually did and would later articulate brilliantly in his 2020 song “Murder Most Foul”). In 1974, this former musician takes up a Bible study course, becomes a pastor and begins to sing gospel music to congregations.
While it is a bit distracting to have Christian Bale play a guy who’s supposed to be in his 20s as well as sometimes come off like he’s impersonating Bob Dylan as opposed to playing him, this is still an excellent depiction of Bob Dylan’s rise to stardom and his evangelical awakening. Both of these eras represent Dylan trying to use music to change things, first to sway hearts and then to sway souls. Bale is especially good at conveying a frustration with the status quo and trying to be truthful as an artist, even if what he has to say is not received well or even articulately spoken. It’s a unique pairing because, despite the film taking a chronological approach to Dylan’s story, who would have thought to put his early folk era with his Christian era? They offset each other well and show the range Dylan has as an artist, going from songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to “Pressing On” within two decades.
Then there’s the avatar that pretty much steals the show with Jude Quinn’s portrait of Bob Dylan at his most iconic, strung-out and controversial in 1965. Even people who have never seen “I’m Not There” probably know about Cate Blanchett’s performance and how seamless it is. While I expressed a few nit-picks with how Bale tried to capture Bob Dylan in his early years, none of those are to be found with Blanchett. With Dylan at his most androgynous, in sharp contrast with his simple folk persona of the early 60s and the family man he became in Woodstock during the late 60s and early 70s, having a woman play this role really works. It’s like having Marcus Carl Franklin, a black boy, play Dylan as a child. It pushes boundaries and shows that Dylan’s lives are so dynamic that they shouldn’t be limited by gender or race.
Hounded by reporters, most notably the antagonistic Mr. Jones (Bruce Greenwood), taking amphetamines and pissing off his fans by playing rock music, Jude descends into a sleepless spiral that eventually is his undoing as we see in the film’s beginning. At this point of his life, Dylan broke from folk music with the albums “Bringing It All Back Home”, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde On Blonde” and was embarking on greuling tours that plagued him with boos and drug use. As depicted in the 1960s documentaries “Don’t Look Back” and “Eat The Document” (both were shot by D.A. Pennebaker with the later being edited by Bob Dylan), Dylan was tired and frustrated with Jude reflecting these feelings. He can be an asshole but it’s hard not to see why when everyone is looking at him as either a messiah or a traitor. The only times Jude feels like he can relax are when he’s hanging out with the Beatles (Dylan first introduced them to marijuana) and Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) and when he’s on that stage, despite being booed.
There’s a reason why this performance is so iconic because Blanchett truly embodies the spirit of Bob Dylan during this tumultuous and heavily publicized period. Her movement and voice feels like a pure performance and not like a shallow impression as Jude tours England and has to deal with Mr. Jones asking if he still cares about the causes he once supported and if he still protests. The animosity these two have is pure to the real life relationship between Dylan and the press at the time since music publications that actually took rock music seriously were still a few years away. It’s the most famous part of the film and deservedly so.
Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) and his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is one of the film’s strongest emotional cornerstones and is my favorite story within the film.
Cate Blanchett’s performance might be the most famous element of “I’m Not There” but, for my money, it’s the scenes centered around Heath Ledger’s portrayal of Robbie Clark that makes for my favorite part of the film. Unlike the previously mentioned avatars, Robbie Clark isn’t a musician. Instead, he’s an actor who, in a touch of meta storytelling, became famous by playing Jack Rollins in the film “Grain of Sand”. In this storyline, the film follows the relationship that Robbie has with an artist named Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) from their initial meeting on the set of “Grain of Sand” in 1964 to their courtship to their marriage to their divorce in the mid-1970s. It is in this part of the film that we see a truly personal side of Bob Dylan’s life with Robbie and Claire’s relationship having a strong parallel to the marriage of Bob and Sara Dylan, which lasted from 1965 to 1977 and saw the birth of four of Dylan’s children along with the adoption of Sara’s daughter from her previous marriage.
During the bulk of Dylan’s first marriage, he was content to be a family man in Woodstock, NY after his motorcycle accident, refraining from touring in favor of only producing albums not unlike The Beatles post-1966. However, as the 1970s rolled on, Dylan became more comfortable touring (first with The Band in 1974, then as The Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, then a Never Ending Tour that continues to this day) which could have put strain on his marriage. I say could have because Dylan is incredibly concerned with keeping his private life as private as possible. As shown in this storyline, he tried his best to keep his family out of the limelight (something his children praised him for) and was balancing his art with the needs of his wife and children.
It’s this balance that Robbie Clark struggles with and what makes this part of the film so endearing to me are the deeply human performances of Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg. This relationship is beautiful in its inception and even the disintegration of it is handled with such grace. While there are hints at why Robbie and Claire’s relationship ended, like Robbie potentially having affairs, we do see these two drift apart and it’s heartbreaking to see where it all leads. However, the good times are still so lovely and, even though they divorce, their commitment to raising their children is stronger than ever.
Unlike the Jude Quinn or the Jack Rollins storylines that have much more basis in the real events of Dylan’s life, Robbie’s story is far more allegorical and takes advantage of the fact that these are all fictional characters. It would be harder to make a traditional biopic and depict Bob and Sara Dylan’s relationship because there’s the possibility of crossing some kind of line and it would be hard to get any relevant information since this part of Dylan’s life is secluded. Instead, we have a fictional romance that does give us insight into who Bob Dylan was as a husband and as a father.
This part of the film isn’t afraid to go into some of Dylan’s more controversial aspects like when Robbie says that women could never be poets on the same level as Shakespeare, Whitman or Rimbaud (something that Dylan actually said, although I’m not sure if he still believes this since he made that statement in the 70s). While we don’t see Robbie strap on a guitar and white face paint to play a song from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, that’s not what this portion of the film is trying to accomplish. The other parts of the film, to this point, were far more interested in Dylan’s musical life while Robbie’s story is all about the relationships Dylan cultivated. While Ledger’s tragic death did prevent him from seeing his Oscar-winning performance in “The Dark Knight” on the big screen, “I’m Not There” was the last film to have been released in his lifetime and I’m so glad that he got to see himself juxtaposed with the wonderful acting of his peers.
Heath Ledger’s performance in “I’m Not There” was the last performance that was released during his lifetime.
The next part of the film continues the arc established in Robbie’s narrative as not only does it focus on a character that isn’t a musician but it also has a connection to the period of time when Bob Dylan had retreated from public view in Woodstock. But while Robbie Clark’s story was more focused on his marriage, the performance of Richard Gere as Billy the Kid looks into Bob Dylan’s decision to hide away and his eventual return to touring. Set in the late 1800s, Billy McCarty has survived his supposed death at the hands of Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood) and has been hiding out in the town of Riddle, Missouri. When an older Pat Garrett returns to announce a railroad that will cut through Riddle, Billy must realize that he can’t outrun his past.
Aside from the obvious reference that Bob Dylan did the music for and starred in the 1973 Sam Peckinpah film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”, this story arc not only has strong allegories to the reclusive period of Dylan’s life but also enters into some of the surreal imagery that would be present in his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue. The town of Riddle has a distinct personality to it with people wearing face paint, wearing masks and feeling like a blend of 1970s Westerns like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”, “Little Big Man” and the work of Peckinpah.
With Richard Gere’s performance, he plays this character as an old and battered man trying to live a peaceful life, very similar to John Wayne in “The Searchers” or Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven”. However, he seems even more intent to be out of trouble. But when Pat Garrett comes back into his life, Billy finds himself arrested, broken out of jail and on the run. Much like Billy, Bob Dylan couldn’t outrun his fame and eventually decided to embrace it.
Finally, Ben Whishaw appears sporadically throughout the film as the famed poet Arthur Rimbaud. Alongside other poets like Dylan Thomas, who Bob Dylan took his last name from, the writing of Rimbaud was exceptionally influential on Bob Dylan’s work. It was surreal, full of angst and far darker than other popular work at the time. However, despite so much initial success with collections like “The Drunken Boat” and “A Season in Hell”, Rimbaud stopped writing at the age of 20 and would travel the world until his death in 1891 at the age of 37. You could make multiple parallels between Rimbaud’s life and Dylan’s early years and that’s certainly what Whishaw’s performance is going for. This is a representation of the dark force that drives Dylan’s more reclusive behavior, the side of him that is content to lock himself away from the world and bang out songs on a typewriter.
While not given a narrative arc like the other avatars, the words of Rimbaud certainly leave their mark on the rest of his counterparts. I am especially drawn to the moment where Rimbaud lays down the seven rules for a life in hiding which, at first, are silly in their execution and are humorously written but do reveal a darker undertone.
Never trust a cop in a raincoat.
Beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway.
If asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again.
Never give your real name.
If ever asked to look at yourself, don’t.
Never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand.
Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.
The last rule has a particular quality to it. After all, so many of us have tried to pass upon Bob Dylan, and other artists, labels that they never intended to have. People looked to Bob Dylan as the voice of a generation whose songs could inspire a new cosmic utopia or, as written in Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl”, an “ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” All Dylan wanted to be was a songwriter, not a prophet. Prophets must be foolproof. They must be beyond human and Bob Dylan is as human as they come.
Directed by Todd Haynes, “I’m Not There” completely flips the music biopic genre on its head with its unconventional storytelling.
Accompanying the excellent performances and Todd Haynes’ top-notch direction and screenplay, cowritten with Oren Moverman, is a massive amount of talent working behind the scenes to create the visual language of this film. With most biopics, even the ones set across multiple decades, there’s a commitment to one visual style. There’s the warmth of country music brought to life in “Walk The Line”, the harsh grit of punk as see in “Sid and Nancy” and the vibrant energy of “Elvis” but all of these films have a consistent visual style.
“I’m Not There” is radically different with its approach because each section of the film has a wildly different visual style that amplifies the tones of each of these mini-stories. That means cinematographer Edward Lachman (a frequent collaborator of Haynes whose work includes music films like “Selena”, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” and “True Stories”) had to come up with six different shooting styles and what an exciting venture that must have been. Working with different cameras, different film stocks, different kinds of shots and different color schemes all to give a visual sign to the audience what story they’re watching as well as conveying the meaning of each of them.
In the case of Woody’s story, much of it feels influenced by American films that felt centered in realism. The work of Elia Kazan is referenced with a conversation between Woody and a couple of hobos he encounters on a boxcar being lifted from a conversation Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal in “A Face in the Crowd” (lifted in the same loving way Spike Lee took Robert Mitchum’s speech from “Night of the Hunter” for “Do The Right Thing”) but I also got a strong connection to John Ford. If Ford shot “The Grapes of Wrath” with color stock, I’d imagine it would have this faded tone to it that just screams classic Americana of the Dust Bowl era, fighting since Woody wants to emulate the great Woody Guthrie.
As previously mentioned, Jack Rollins’ story is shot to look like a 1970s television news story with “contemporary footage” of Father John’s gospel show mixed with archival footage of Jack Rollins navigating the world of folk music. Multiple sections, when viewed side-by-side with the footage that inspired them, are almost identical. It’s hard to separate a young Bob Dylan on “The Steve Allen Show” with Christian Bale’s counterpart.
Jude Quinn’s storyline takes on a far more surrealistic tone than what would have been expected. Since the mid-60s was a period of Dylan’s life covered by two cinema verité documentaries (“Don’t Look Back” in black-and-white and “Eat The Document” in color), going towards that style was too obvious, I guess. Why do what’s already been done before? Instead, Lachman takes on the look of Federico Fellini’s black-and-white films, mainly “8½”, as well as references to filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman. When Jude sings “Ballad of a Thin Man”, the film briefly turns into a music video with the surreal imagery really coming out to play since the suspension of disbelief is much higher for a musical sequence as opposed to a one-on-one conversation. With a character named Mr. Jones existing both in the song and in Jude’s story, this rendition feels like a massive spear of hate thrown down the throats of all of the snooty, arrogant members of the press that were trying to condescend to Bob Dylan with their trite questions.
Also shot in black-and-white are the stark scenes of Arthur Rimbaud where he’s being interrogated by police over a domestic matter, a reference to Rimbaud’s tumultuous affair with poet Paul Verlaine. Rimbaud is always looking directly into the camera, staring directly at the audience as he delivers his oratory. When faced with the lush textures of Woody Guthrie’s narrative or the crazed images of Jude’s amphetamine-induced state, such sequences are jarring and tether you to the concept of the film literally speaking to you at times.
With Robbie Clark, his arc has much resemblance to the color films of Jean-Luc Godard with Lachman stating that “Masculine Feminine” and “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” were clear influences. These films and Robbie’s story all have this beautiful intimacy to them. The drama isn’t about being called a traitor by your audience or being on-the-run from an old sheriff, it’s just about two people in a broken situation.
As for Billy, his whole world combines a lot of the images associated with Dylan during his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, as well as some of his album covers like “The Basement Tapes” and “Desire”, and blends them with the western film genre. However, the town or Riddle doesn’t look like any western that John Ford, Fred Zinnemann or Howard Hawks ever made. These scenes have a stronger resemblance to the westerns that were coming out of the “New Hollywood” era with strong examples including “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid”. It’s a Western but more like the kind that Bob Dylan would have been seeing in theaters when they were first released.
The way these storylines are cut up and pieced together again feels so organic to me. Everytime I watch “I’m Not There”, I’m surprised at what transpires because I could have sworn a certain scene happened later in the film. No matter how many times I watch it, I always forget what happened where, even though I remember everything. It's a cinematic patchwork.
More than anything, the film’s relationship to the music is a driving force in its identity. No other film has been able to use this much of Bob Dylan’s music in one place. More importantly, these songs aren’t just thrown around to look cool. They all have purpose. Some are obvious like Jack Rollins singing several folk hits like “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” as well as the gospel hit “Pressing On” when he becomes a pastor. Jude also gets some explosive rock numbers like “Maggie’s Farm” and “The Ballad of a Thin Man” while Woody sings Dylan’s earlier songs about discovery like “When The Ship Comes In”. Other songs are used in a non-diegetic way like when, early in Robbie and Claire’s courtship, “I Want You” is blaring. As for Billy, not only was his own guitar theme written by Calexico but the songs of Bob Dylan’s basement tapes (which he recorded with The Band in the basement of a pink house in Woodstock now known as Big Pink) like “Goin’ to Acapulco” are used to heighten the western feeling of the town of Riddle.
With so many films being lucky to afford the rights to just one Bob Dylan song, “I’m Not There” took great advantage of the gift it was given and made great use of Bob Dylan’s words as well as a phenomenal soundtrack album. The album (released as a double CD, digitally and as a four-LP vinyl album) serves as a strong tribute album with artists (some of which appear in the film while others just recorded songs from the soundtrack album) like Cat Power, Richie Havens, Willie Nelson, Eddie Vedder, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Jeff Tweedy all taking their fair shots at this brilliant material.
But ultimately, aside from the performances, direction, writing, editing, music and cinematography, we must ask how “I’m Not There” functions as a biopic. The short answer is that it’s brilliant. While each of the stories are entertaining and do offer a beautiful slice of the puzzle that is Bob Dylan, it all comes together when all six pieces are fully formed in “I’m Not There”. What these people represent perfectly summarizes the first thirty years of Dylan’s career with Woody representing the youthful spirit Dylan had before he even cut his first record, Arthur Rimbaud capturing the angst that would fuel much of his music (regardless of influence from folk, rock or country), Jack Rollins being both the Greenwich poet of the early 60s and the preacher of the late 1970s, Jude Quinn embodying the rocker that shook up the world in the mid-60s, Robbie Clark showing us the most personal side of Dylan’s relationships and Billy The Kid symbolizing Dylan’s eventual emergence from his self-imposed exile in the mid-1970s. It’s all there.
However, there’s this lack of completion to the whole thing that is intentional. Just as the film ends with Billy the Kid escaping from jail, finding a guitar with “This Machine Kills Fascists” written on it (the same slogan that was on both the fake and real Woody Guthrie’s guitar) and riding a boxcar into an uncertain future, Bob Dylan’s life didn’t end in the late 70s with his conversion to Christianity. That might be where the film stops chronologically but there’s so much more. There’s Bob Dylan supporting causes like USA for Africa and Farm Aid, his numerous successful albums, an Oscar win for Best Original Song, a Nobel Prize in Literature, touring with numerous other musicians like Willie Nelson and the Grateful Dead, him officially releasing restored bootlegs and live albums, the founding of the supergroup The Travelling Wilburys and his Never Ending Tour that continues to this day. I was even able to see him perform in November 2023 as he performed many songs from his 2020 album “Rough and Rowdy Ways”. You would need multiple films to cram all that in but that’s not what “I’m Not There” is about.
While the film isn’t a traditional biopic, it captures some of the most important pieces of Bob Dylan’s life while others are never found. It’s like the ending of “Citizen Kane” when some people begin to lament to the reporter Thompson that they never found out what Rosebud was. The reporter just tells them that it wouldn’t have explained anything. No one word can sum up a man’s life. Just as no one film can do the same thing. So, rather than try to film as much of a person’s Wikipedia page, Todd Haynes decided to look at Bob Dylan’s life with heavy research, then chuck his notes in the bin and write down his interpretation. Instead of one story, we’ve got six. Do all of these stories take place in the same universe? Who cares.
“I’m Not There” is not just one of the best biopics ever made, it’s one of my favorite films. While I sincerely hope that James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown” does well with its depiction of Bob Dylan, it won’t change just how brilliant this film is. It’s a remarkable portrait of Bob Dylan. I think that it was altogether fitting to have Kris Kristofferson’s voice in the film’s opening because this film is very much like a lyric in his song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33”. A walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction. After seeing it, you’ll want to look back and see how much of this film was true and how much was fiction.
When I was looking at a clip of the film on YouTube, I saw a comment where a viewer said that they showed the film to their father who was a massive Dylan fan. All the father had to say was, “this isn’t a movie about Bob Dylan. It’s if Bob Dylan was a movie.” That’s the best explanation you can possibly get.
