To come at a stubborn subject from multiple angles was a smart move, but Haynes is so enthralled by the stylistic opportunities that his plan affords, as he was in the fifties-hued “Far from Heaven,” that he ends up more interested in the angles than in anything else, leaving the elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away.īlanchett seems to yield herself to the project with more gusto and curiosity than the others, as if there were truths about Dylan that need to be unearthed, not merely toyed with, and she is unafraid to remind us of what a pain the man could be, especially when stoned, but even she has to wrestle with the camp knowingness of the script (“I’m the only one with any balls”) and, more alarming, with the flimsiness of the context. Dylan, to judge by the ardor of his admirers, is indeed inexhaustible, in his gifts as in his changes of tack, and one quite understands why Haynes-who co-wrote the film with Oren Moverman-should have scorned a plain bio-pic.
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The problem for “I’m Not There” is not one of credibility (after all, these tales are meant to be tall) but of what authority a movie retains when its component parts fly off in different directions. But the Gere rendition is little more than a lazy gloss on the legend of the vanishing West as a rule, any film that offers cameos to circus performers and random zoo animals has reached the point at which invention becomes desperation. Gere plays Billy-a nod to Billy the Kid, and thus to the music that Dylan contributed to Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973), in which he also acted. This, I fear, is where my patience snapped, and I doubt whether that of Dylan fans will prove any more elastic. Got that? Just as you’re wondering how much farther from the art of Bob Dylan this movie is prepared to stray, up pops Richard Gere. Then, there is Heath Ledger, who plays an actor named Robbie, who himself plays the fractionally Dylan-like hero in “Grain of Sand,” a nonexistent Hollywood film, and whose wooing of a French painter (Charlotte Gainsbourg) takes up an unlikely slice of the action. Those in the know will feel smug everyone else will be baffled.) Christian Bale, as authentically gaunt as the folk-era Dylan, plays Jack Rollins, who shows up in New York and transfixes the musical scene toward the end, he emerges as a born-again Christian pastor in California-a deliberate overstretch by Haynes, since Dylan, though he turned to God in the late seventies, was never a minister. Ben Whishaw, who starred in the malodorous “Perfume,” is interviewed as though under arrest, and gives his name as “Arthur Rimbaud.” (To help us connect the dots, a version of Rimbaud’s most famous phrase, “I is someone else,” is uttered later by another character. Four of the other Dylan figures, all played by capable actors, are left stranded in the luscious mire of Haynes’s fantasies. Nonetheless, Marcus Carl Franklin, operating on sheer brio, makes more of an impact than most of his fellow-performers. Like the other pseudo-Dylans who populate the story, he is there for a purpose, and behind the gleam of the film-Haynes has an exacting eye for décor, and the rural American past is drenched in sap greens and warm tobacco browns-there is no mistaking a hard, Brechtian sense of dramatis personae being used like tools. We are kept so busy trying to weigh the burden of cultural meaning that the poor kid has to carry that we never find time to grant him, as a person, anything but the most fleeting of existences. The question is: What is the kid doing in a film about Dylan? Well, you could view him as an oblique comment on Dylan’s own reverence for Guthrie (as evidenced by “Song to Woody,” on his début album), and on the debt that he owed to a particular strain of black music, but that’s the problem: this “Woody Guthrie” is a comment, not a character.
The kid shows up throughout the film, and we have the pleasure of seeing him perform-an eager, unfeigned pleasure, because Franklin can really sing, and he gets the chance for a brisk trio on a front porch, with none other than Richie Havens plucking away beside him. A young, guitar-toting black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) hops a freight train, finds a pair of hoboes, and declares that his name is Woody Guthrie. COURTESY ED LACHMAN/THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY (2007)
Cate Blanchett as one of the Dylanesque characters in Todd Haynes’s new movie.
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