Director Todd Haynes’s casting of six actors — including Cate Blanchett — as Bob Dylan in his film I'm Not There garnered attention, but Haynes’s choice is an astute reading of Dylan's many personas in 45 restless years in the public eye. Correspondingly, 28 musical acts reinterpret 33 Dylan songs on the film's two-disc soundtrack.
The Dylan songbook remains fertile ground, from the old, weird Americana of 1962's Bob Dylan to his recent recordings, marked by periods of genre-straddling innovation and simple artisanship. Dylan devotees, or Bobcats, will nod knowingly at the title track, first recorded as part of the legendary “basement tapes” with The Band and heard here in both its original form and a ghostly take by Sonic Youth.
Dylan's contemporary influence rarely occurs as explicitly as, say, Oasis’s Beatles homage, but Jack Johnson — on "Mama, You've Been on My Mind" — follows the Dylan template for a worldly yet nonchalant sex symbol. Cat Power's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" and three songs from Stephen Malkmus reveal the model for today’s inscrutable rock star comes directly from Dylan's ’60s heyday. Like Malkmus, Yo La Tengo, Mason Jennings and John Doe reappear throughout the two discs, lending I'm Not There a welcome coherence.
Further verisimilitude comes from the Million Dollar Bashers and Calexico handling backing duties on many of the tracks. The former group — an ad hoc ensemble featuring Tom Verlaine, John Medeski and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley — act like the studio cats who fired up Dylan's ’60s recordings. Calexico, in a best-supporting-actor role, tackle songs from Dylan's work with The Band to the more intricate backdrops of his ’70s LPs.
The Calexico-backed “One More Cup of Coffee” features former Byrd and Dylan fellow traveller Roger McGuinn, who, alongside Richie Havens and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, lends I'm Not There a broader perspective than the purely modern acts can provide. Even Willie Nelson, guilty of phoning in his performances for awhile now, sounds inspired by Calexico on "Señor," especially alongside Salvador Duran's second vocal.
I'm Not There is no eulogy. Sufjan Stevens rebuilds "Ring Them Bells" with the same ingenuity he brought to "Free Man in Paris" on this year's A Tribute to Joni Mitchell. Like Verlaine's ambient, homicidal take on "Cold Irons Bound," Stevens suggests Dylan's recent songs are as open-ended as his acknowledged classics. John Doe even takes Dylan's ’80s born-again Christianity to a heretofore unexpressed conclusion, proposing it’s the Dylan equivalent of Elvis in Las Vegas — and proves it's a good thing, too.
As a film, I'm Not There will need to succeed despite its unconventional casting, as well as the high expectations of Bobcats wielding A Tree with Roots (the original, illegal home of the title song). With this soundtrack, Haynes and fellow producers Jim Dunbar and Randall Poster have set another benchmark — and raised expectations even further.
