Published: December 07, 2007 10:10 am            

‘I’m not There’ as honest as a Dylan flick could be

Film Review

There’s this scene in Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic where a band of Civil War veterans fronted by Jim James of My Morning Jacket is performing “Goin’ to Acapulco” on a weathered bandstand next to the upright casket of an angelic young girl who has slit her own throat while an over-the-hill Billy the Kid, played by Richard Gere as a hermitic Bob Dylan, looks on from the crowd.

For this scene to make any sense, it would help to know a few things. One would be that “Goin’ to Acapulco” is a Bob Dylan song recorded in 1967 during “The Basement Tapes” sessions, the same sessions that yielded the song “I’m Not There.” Two would be a passing familiarity with Greil Marcus’ book “The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes,” which advances a theory that the off-kilter, traditional-sounding songs of “The Basement Tapes” offer a kind of alternative history of the United States. Three would be that Bob Dylan did the soundtrack and had a role as the “Alias” in the 1973 movie “Pat Garret and Billy the Kid.”

That’s a steeper learning curve than most movies require of an audience, and even then, there’s going to be much to puzzle over, considering “I’m Not There” is ostensibly a Dylan biopic, and this scene is taking place in the 1800s in the fictional town of Riddle, Mo. Then again, the words “Bob Dylan” aren’t uttered once, and six different actors tackle different iterations of Dylan’s persona, none of whom are called Bob Dylan, so it’s clear we’re in uncharted territory here.

To that, I say thank God! Did we really need another Oscar-bating, linear hagiography of a drug-abusing troubled genius? I don’t think so, and after watching “I’m Not There,” I’m not sure an honest Dylan movie could have been made any other way.

Here are the six parts of Dylan that unspool and overlap during the course of “I’m Not There.”

Woody Guthrie: A precocious 11-year-old black boy who tramps around with a guitar talking as if he’s straight out of the Dust Bowl of the ‘30s. Played by Marcus Carl Franklin, he does a mean Bob Dylan cover.

Arthur Rimbaud: This is Bob Dylan as poet, hence the name. Played by Ben Winshaw, this Dylan is interspersed throughout the movie answering questions that are posed off-camera. He smokes a lot of cigarettes and makes interesting comments while looking fashionably gaunt.

Jack Rollins: Played by Christian Bale, this is the folk-hero Dylan, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan“, boyfriend to Joan Baez and king of the Newport Folk Festival. Bale also plays a middle-aged Rollins as the “born-again” Dylan. In this scene he is a preacher in a bad suit performing a riveting version of “Pressing On” in a ‘70s-orange community center.

Robbie Clark: Clark, played by Heath Ledger, is a Brando-esque actor who plays Rollins in a movie that is a biopic of the young Rollins. You follow? If “I’m Not There” has an emotional core, it’s the straightforward story of Clark and how his marriage to Claire (a substitute for Sara Dylan?), played by a luminescent Charlotte Gainsbourg, falls apart.

Jude Quinn: This is the iconic, angry pop-star Dylan as revealed in the “Don’t Look Back” documentary. I have not had a better time at the movies this year than watching Cate Blanchett as the amphetamine-fueled Dylan who cavorts with the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg, spurns Edie Sedgwick and enrages reporters and his folk fan base.

Billy the Kid: What if Pat Garret didn’t kill him? And what if they met again when both were much older, and Garret was about to wipe Billy’s town of freaks and misfits off the map? With this story, Haynes brings the “old, weird America” to life, and what better way to explore American mythology than through Billy the Kid?

The performances are uniformly great, even if Blanchett’s Dylan does burst like some kind of controlled supernova outshining all the others, and once you get used to the rhythms of the movie’s logic, the film is eminently watchable, beautifully shot, and a powerful reminder of how good Dylan’s music still sounds.

All the legendary moments of Dylan’s life are present — a drunken Dylan comparing himself to Lee Harvey Oswald while accepting a Civil Rights award, going electric at Newport in 1965, Dylan’s motorcycle crash — along with the apocryphal and the imaginary. This Dylan mélange explores Dylan as he exists in the pop-cultural consciousness and gets much closer to truth than any generic biopic could ever hope.

Of course, once you’ve finished watching “I’m Not There” you’re no closer to answering “who is Bob Dylan?” than when you started. Except if you’re still asking that question, you missed the point of the movie.

        

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