I was exasperated and intrigued by director Todd Haynes’ unconventional account of Bob Dylan’s life and times and music when it opened last fall. I didn’t like I'm Not There, but didn’t reject it. I wasn’t entirely certain if I was unprepared for its unexpected form and approach to one of the most important musical artist’s of the last century or annoyed at what I took for pretentiousness. I wrote a short film paragraph on I’m NotThere instead of a full review because I couldn’t pin down my mixed, shifting feelings. I wanted to see it a second time but never got around to it.
Now it’s out on DVD and have no excuse for putting it off. I’ve re-watched I’m Not There and think it’s sometimes brilliant. Then again, I’m still not entirely in its corner. Maybe that’s because the film can’t be cornered. Like Dylan himself, I’m Not There is resolutely determined to escape any narrow interpretation. It refuses to be cut and dried. It won’t be marched in a straight line and interrogated under hot lights. If nothing else, I’m Not There is not one of those boring VH-1 look-backs at a faded star.
The idea of fracturing the historic Dylan into six fictional characters played by different actors is a lucid strategy for unpacking the contradictory complexity of a songwriter who became the voice of his generation only to reject the role of spokesman. Maybe that should have been no surprise from someone who was slippery from the moment he appeared on stage. His original persona as a heartland Dust Bowl folksinger, a latter-day Woody Guthrie in a Huck Finn cap, was wholly invented. Dylan was really a Jewish kid from Minnesota electrified by rock’n’roll in the 1950s but intrigued by the folk-blues revival that began to peak in the early ‘60s. When he became a star he hid himself from the glare of newspaper cameras and inane questions in a hall of mirrors, dodging behind a fun house of non-answers, non-sequitors and poses of sarcastic indifference. From there he retreated into enigmatic isolation, flirted with Nashville, became a secluded family man, worked hard to dismantle his reputation. Then he embraced Protestant fundamentalism and, afterward, slipped the net of meaning once again.
Making complete sense of Dylan would challenge the greatest biographer. Haynes decided to sidestep a linear chronology of explanations and events by sketching the suggestion of larger truths through merging fact, fiction and mythology. Haynes wanted to get at the essence of Dylan by splitting him into a set of characters whose plot lines don’t entirely fit together. I’m Not There is like a Cubist painting in motion, showing its story from several angles in as close an approximation of simultaneity as a single screen film can achieve.
The result is puzzling at first. Like most great, important or at least interesting art it gives up its secrets little by little, layer by layer. It’s a film that demands mental and emotional engagement from the audience, not passive consumption. I’m Not There is bravura cinema to be sure. Do I entirely like it? I still wonder about two of Haynes’ casting choices: positioning a barely adolescent African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) as a projection of Dylan’s original fantasy of folkloric self-invention; and a white woman (Cate Blanchett) as the dandified Dylan of Carnaby Street hidden behind dark glasses. They are memorable performances but embodying Dylan in those ways still strike me as distracting. The casting inevitably becomes the subject, not the person or the ideas the actors represent.
And then there is the creative re-imaginating of Dylan’s career, such as turning him into a successful screen actor of the early ‘70s. Maybe the reason for this will become apparent on future viewings. Perhaps it’s an ironic comment on the failure of Dylan, who was always playacting, to make much of a mark on screen. I also don’t care for the lapses into caricature, especially the response by folksinger Pete Seeger and the crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Haynes shows Seeger as a lunatic hatchet man and Dylan being booed and jeered by mindless folkies for daring to play rock’n’roll. The depiction reflects the legend surrounding that event but possibly not the reality. Recent historical accounts suggest that the uproar resulted from a rotten sound mix through the primitive amplification, not a wholesale rejection of Dylan’s new music. Haynes, however, went with the myth of Newport, which like every myth conveys a truth regardless of factuality. The truth is that once an artist becomes popular, many of his fans will try to imprison him in their own preconceptions. They will try to pin him down to the sort of one-dimensional surface interpretation that Dylan, and I’m Not There, have worked hard and successfully to evade.
