I was hoping to get this review up yesterday, but my internet service provider had a big Net outage at about the time I was going to sit down to write it. It’s just one of those moments when you realize how dependent you are on some things. Maybe this would work out, though. I’m Not There is a very unconventional movie as it is, with a nonlinear narrative there to tell the story, sort of, of Bob Dylan.
I tend not to know much about the lives of musicians, and I like to use movies like this to try and learn something. Sometimes I even do! Will this quasi-Dylan biopic be one of those instances?
Early in director Todd Haynes’s movie, the movie establishes that the movie will be telling about the life of someone who seemed to have six distinct public personas in his life: the poet, the prophet, the outlaw, the fake, the martyr, and the “star of electricity.” Over the course of the movie, these characters, each played by a very different actor, will have little if any contact with each other, but each one represents some facet of Dylan’s life, and they appear in the movie in different times and places.
That means that poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) gives cryptic answers while under interrogation. Prophet Jack Rawlins/Father John (Christian Bale) is the focus of a documentary talking about his finding Jesus. Outlaw Billy McCarty (Richard Gere) is in the Old West trying to hide from the rest of the world before someone realizes he’s Billy the Kid. Child Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) is running away from home under the name of his musical hero. Big time 60s rocker Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett, the only one doing a Bob Dylan impression) is living the fast and loose lifestyle and headed for an early grave. And then there’s actor Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), an actor who played Jack in a movie and has a marriage that is falling apart. And that is more or less the movie.
So, I’ll be honest: I had a hard time with this one. I know nothing about Bob Dylan, and the movie is maybe supporting the idea that nobody knows much about him, hence the reason there are different actors playing different characters that are all kinda sorta the same guy. The end result is the movie didn’t work for me. I recognize it as a quality piece of work, but between the slipping back and forth between narratives and the Dylan-based soundtrack, and I was largely just trying to figure out what I was supposed to get out of it. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but that’s what I was thinking.
That means that this wasn’t really a movie for me. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just not for me. I didn’t really learn anything about the real Dylan, I didn’t become any more or less a fan of his music, and that is all I am going to say about this movie. It probably works much better for a fan.
Grade: C+
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