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I'm Not There (2007)

Director: Todd Haynes

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2 reviews

Synopsis

Todd Haynes’s (‘Safe’, ‘Far from Heaven’) long-gestating take on the life of Bob Dylan features several different actors playing the folk legend, including Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw and Cate Blanchett, in ‘Blonde On Blonde’-era shades and fro-wig.

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Kaleidoscopic, grandly tuneful and definitely not your average biopic (perhaps not a biopic at all), Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan movie is the imaginative feat of the year. An untethered leap into celebrity deconstruction, the film is bound to enrage purists who expect one of those fawning “essential moments” narratives; yes, Dylan does go electric at Newport in 1965, but “he” is actually a she (the perverse Blanchett), and that isn’t a guitar in her grip but a machine gun, strafing the crowd. Still with me?

If there’s a director at work today to trust with your musical legacy—as Dylan has—it’s Haynes, who dives into his pop stars like the journalist from Velvet Goldmine and consistently arrives at the tender truth of self-reinvention. (Were Richard Carpenter to really watch Haynes’s Barbie-doll Superstar, he’d see it as empathetic toward Karen and him both.) Much has already been made of Haynes’s casting of six different actors to play Dylan, each providing a different shade of ego. But the takeaway here is less slippery chameleon than tribute to an artist’s fecundity: If you’re seeking blues credibility, why not see yourself as a wandering black troubadour child (the amazing Marcus Carl Franklin) instead of a Minnesotan Jew?

Still, is any flavor of Dylan particularly relevant? This is the sneaky brilliance of I’m Not There; as its visual fabric shifts from shiny Fellini-esque popscapes to Cambodian bombings and dissembling Presidents, you feel the rush of today’s sick-making sociopolitical climate. Dylan somehow made it through, but at what cost? Essential viewing.

Author: Joshua Rothkopf

Time Out New York Issue 634: November 22-28, 2007

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User reviews of this film

  • ellenroman said...
    Posted on Dec 02 2007 18:51 I don't know what the above commentor is talking about (I suspect maybe HE"s the stoned freshman...) but I thought this film was fantastic. Nobody's ever going to get Bob just right, and that's the whole point!
    Report as inappropriate
  • borrisbatanov said...
    Posted on Nov 30 2007 13:33 These stars, who we KNOW, as a certainty, breath a different air, have different blood in their veins. On the outside they’re just like you‘n me and at the VERY same time saints, angels, devils, mysterious ghosts and sprites. How does this happen?
    There, under the album covers, the endless chatter, the thousand words and photos, secreted somewhere, there MUST be a hard truth, plain and reliable, unadorned and true. After all, today, centuries after the fact, we KNOW Bach, Shakespeare. Why not Bob Dylan?
    Why not? Because media are a bunch of stoned freshmen, sweating sperm, addicted to fame and fortune. He swam, in his time, his place, an illusion, in this sea of sheet.
    Even tho he told us “Don’t Look Back,” “Bring It All Back Home,” now, rootless, confused and spoiled, we look back, and put everything up for sale, up on the screen, i things and cells in our sweaty palms. We WANT that easy ring-tone answer, that final electronic summation. We must defeat the past, chaos.
    And along comes Todd Haynes to do just that, provide a passing distraction, holdable and as cute as a cell phone or iPod, as artsy as an iPod TV ad. There goes Bob, one minute a black kid spouting ridiculous self-serious Steinbeck platitudes, another a world-weary wasted Cate Blanchett, wilted and defiant, always fashionably poised, photogenic.
    This is ‘America’s Next Top Model’ in retrospect, a done deal, Dylan as Suffering Saint, the Hunger Artist eating caviar, the outsider who’s In.
    Dylan, darling, free of the stink and shame of failure, poverty.
    Report as inappropriate

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I'm Not There

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Cast & crew

Director: Todd Haynes

Producer: Christine Vachon, James D Stern, John Sloss, John Goldwyn

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg, David Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Michelle Williams full cast

Genre(s): Drama, Romance

Rated: R

Duration: 135 mins

US Release: Nov 21 2007

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