Marcus Carl Franklin plays Bob Dylan, if Bob Dylan were a young, black blues singer named Woody Guthrie, naturally
A dazzling cinematic seminar in advanced Dylanology, the latest endeavour by Far from Heaven and Safe director Todd Haynes will likely only be fully savoured by viewers who are as obsessed with its subject as its creator is. In the eyes of anyone who bought a bootleg recording of the Rolling Thunder Revue, nursed a grudge against Pete Seeger for trying to cut the cables at Newport in ’65 or ever harboured the desire to sift through a pile of garbage outside Bob’s home, I’m Not There is clearly the greatest film of all time.
Obviously, this is a rather slim demographic, and one whose members don’t clean their beards nearly as often as they ought to. Haynes’s decision to populate his film with stars suggests that he wouldn’t mind it if other people came to see it, too. Though the posters say otherwise, none of the six principal actors actually play Bob Dylan. Instead, they play variations on the many public and private guises employed by the musical icon during the first two decades of his career. While Cate Blanchett gets Bob at his coolest (the skinny-trousered, freshly electrified ’65 to ’66 model), Christian Bale is the singer at his most earnest, both as the protest-era folkie and, in a not-so-implausible version of his middle age, a Christian preacher in a storefront church.
From here it gets wiggier. Heath Ledger has the most meta Bob, playing an actor who becomes a movie star based on his performance as a Bale-Bob-like singer and who later suffers through a protracted marital breakdown à la Blood on the Tracks. (His spouse, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is an amalgam of Sara Dylan and early girlfriend Suze Rotolo.) Richard Gere is a mythical and wizened Bob, wandering amid a consciously cinematic version of the Old West that comes straight outta the ’70s westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman. (In the other sections, Haynes’s movie referents include 8 1/2, Billy Liar and Masculin féminin.) Elsewhere, Ben Whishaw is Bob as a punk Rimbaud, defending his case before a jury of squares, and Marcus Carl Franklin is Bob as Woody Guthrie if Woody Guthrie were a young black boy who played the blues.
You hip to all that? It shouldn’t be so strange to those who saw Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, which laid down the same Chameleon Bob trip, albeit in a far more conventional fashion. With its flash and flair, I’m Not There ups the ante considerably, making not just Scorsese’s doc but nearly every other movie released this year seem hopelessly timid. While it might not be the greatest film of all time, its breathless rush of music and images, appropriately freewheeling narrative structure and audacious enquiries into the nature of art, culture and identity make it the best ’60s movie never made in the ’60s. I’d like to think that Dylan neophytes will be equally captivated, but when it comes to finding an audience for a movie as bold as I’m Not There, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind usually blows.
