FilmBlather.com

"I'm not sure I follow."

Screened at the 2007 Telluride Film Festival

Dylan-ites take note: Todd Haynes' I'm Not There incorporates and represents everything I hate about Bob Dylan, which is what everyone loves about Bob Dylan, so this is emphatically a movie for those who worship the man. Maddening and inaccessible, filled with the sort of insufferable faux-profundity that made the great man famous, the film is a stunning miscalculation for the usually right-on Haynes; a conceptual nightmare, gracelessly executed.

One scene perfectly encapsulates both the man and the film. Cate Blanchett, playing one of the six or so personas Haynes ascribes to Dylan -- a rebel (and male) musician who "betrays" folk music by busting out electric guitars and a drummer -- gives a press conference, and is interrogated by a British journalist played by Bruce Greenwood. Blanchett babbles incoherently, answering questions with questions and refusing to utter a declarative, comprehensible sentence; Greenwood at one point replies: "I'm not sure I follow." It's the sort of trademark Dylan "meaningful" meaninglessness that's on display at every turn here, from Blanchett questioning the definition of the word "people" to Ben Whishaw periodically showing up to spout aphorisms. I sympathized with Greenwood entirely.

The most potent segment here has Dylan's traditionalist side represented by a young, precocious black boy, played by Marcus Carl Franklin. Traversing the countryside with a guitar case that reads "This Guitar Kills Fascists," he starts to give meaning to Haynes' concept of Dylan combining all of these characters. Endowed with the soul of an old man, the boy goes to visit Woody Guthrie on his deathbed (he gives "Woody" as his name, too) while being admonished to "look to his own time." It makes sense, and begins to engender sympathy even in those of us in whom Dylan at best inspires indifference. Of course, Haynes promptly ditches this in favor of complete nonsense about Dylan as Billy the Kid, absurdly played by Richard Gere -- a segment that refuses to end, though it does ultimately connect to the Woody Guthrie storyline in an inscrutable way.

Haynes' direction is a clusterfuck -- people will contend that it's instance of the film's form attempting to imitate its subject, but that strikes me as akin to the argument that The Thin Red Line is a great film because it's long and boring, and so is war. Pulling a Soderbergh, Haynes color-codes the segments, which range from pastoral (Woody Guthrie) to grainy black-and-white (Blanchett). The conceptual disaster hits a nadir when Greenwood -- the persistent, uncomprehending journalist from the Blanchett storylines -- reappears in old-man make-up as Billy the Kid's nemesis. Like much of Dylan's work, this made me actively angry: I'm Not There seems to want to conflate skepticism and rationality with oppression and destruction. Well, here's some skepticism for you: Bob Dylan cannot sing, and never could.

--Eugene Novikov