The Dylans are a-changin'

Published on Saturday 15 December 2007 11:00

I'M NOT THERE Director: Todd Haynes Running time 136 minutes ***

UNLIKE Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan has rarely been confused with God, but he does inspire devotion. With the possible exception of 'Positively 4th Street' and the couple of hits he wrote for the Byrds, Dylan's most impressive creation is his own myth. Lately, Dylan's playfulness has extended to his collaboration with the Scorsese/Arena documentary, a beautiful volume of autobiography which raised more questions than it answered, and an ad for Victoria's Secret. He's become a disc jockey too, doing the thing that DJs should do but don't: evangelising for music that is obscure and inspiring.

What, then, are we to make of I'm Not There, a fictionalised biography in which he is played by six actors, including Cate Blanchett?

Well, first thoughts first. Having digested Todd Haynes's rationale for casting Blanchett – he wanted her to embody the alien quality Dylan had on that 1966 British tour, where his surroundings were grey and damp, and still touched by post-war deprivation and the clammy handshake of music hall – it's hard not to be slightly disappointed with the reality of her performance. It's not that she doesn't play the role well; the disappointment is that she becomes too much like Bob. She dresses like him, walks like him and wears a Dylan bouffant. It's not an exact impersonation but the thin-hipped Cate as Sulky Bob is actually less of a stretch than some of the other performances on display, notably the earliest incarnation, the boxcar-riding Woody, played by the young black actor Marcus Carl Franklin, or Billy, in which Richard Gere offers a portrait of the artist as a post-Woodstock Wild West hero.

Haynes has been along this track before. His 1998 film Velvet Goldmine would have been a Bowie film, had Mr Bowie not wisely withheld his permission, leaving Haines to make a car smash of a feature in which Ziggy Stardust and Iggy Pop wrestled on the rug, figuratively speaking, siring a misshapen baby called glam rock. Appropriately, the film was a turkey dressed in Bacofoil trousers.

I'm Not There is a considerable improvement, and is more coherent than another recent film to employ the device of multiple actors for a single character; Palindromes, by Todd Solondz. But whether it will make any sense to anyone but the most committed Dylanologist is hard to say. Scrub that. It won't.

That doesn't make it bad. But it does make it indulgent. So, just as Haynes's Douglas Sirk pastiche, Far From Heaven, was a brilliant exercise in style with a twist of contemporaneity, so I'm Not There is a Rubik's Cube in which the six sides never quite align, no matter how playfully the director twists them.

Haynes's film shares a conceit with Andrew Piddington's The Killing Of John Lennon, in that the dialogue is taken from interviews and press conferences. These are Bob's words, but that doesn't make them true; the contexts are jumbled and Dylan's name is never used. Everything begins with the motorcycle crash – an event which many Dylan fans believe never happened – and a tombstone, which reads: "There he lies. God rest his soul and his rudeness."

After death, the ghosts arrive. The chutzpah of young Woody splices into Christian Bale, playing Jack Rollins, a "troubadour of conscience", whose career is refracted through a faux-documentary showing his relationship with the Joan Baez-like Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore). Rollins denies being a poet with the line: "Me, I'm a trapeze artist." Heath Ledger plays Robbie Clark, who freewheels toward Blood On The Tracks, reversing away from political activism and into movie acting. Robbie, being a version of Bob, acts out a scene in which he says: "They took away the meaning, Alice. I was a pawn in their game." He then has a blue-skinned naked tumble with Charlotte Gainsbourg, who represents Dylan's girlfriends Suze Rotolo and Sara Lownds. Ben Whishaw's Arthur is a version of Bob as a wisecracking Rimbaud.

Actually, trying to explain things doesn't help. Haynes's central aim is to deepen the sense of mystery and project Dylan as a riddle wrapped inside an enigma, wearing a false moustache. The film is a series of photo-fits; an act of wilful distortion, of mis-remembrance, aspiring to the quality of a dream. "Sleep's for dreamers," one of the Dylans says, chewing Mandrax. "The only natural things are dreams," says another, "which nature cannot touch with decay."

Whether I'm Not There illuminates the real Bob is beside the point. It isn't about Dylan, so much as a series of portraits of a man in disguise. That man is Todd Haynes, a postmodernist who looked in the mirror and saw Jean-Luc Godard.

Released on Friday at the Cameo, Edinburgh, and the Grosvenor, Hillhead, Glasgow.

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