Face to Face

I'm Not There breathes life into the many sides of Bob Dylan.

by Sam Adams

IT AIN'T ME, BABE: Heath Ledger stars as one of Dylan's six incarnations. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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Like a gem whose intrinsic flaws only make it more fascinating, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There changes shape as you hold it to the light. From one angle, it's a postgraduate seminar on the de- and reconstruction of public personae, expressed through the "many lives" of a character who is, and, more intriguingly, is not Bob Dylan. Turned another way, it's an exploration of identity itself, the way a life, famous or unregarded, may slip and shift, so that even one's own past begins to seem strange, disconnected. Still another turn, and it spells out a manifesto for creating personal art in a time of political crisis.

Embodied first as a boxcar-jumping runaway who calls himself Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), I'm Not There's protean subject is reborn as a sober Greenwich Village folkie (Christian Bale), a jailed poet (Ben Whishaw), an abrasive superstar (Cate Blanchett) and a reclusive outlaw (Richard Gere), and his spirit takes up residence in a movie actor (Heath Ledger) who plays one of his incarnations in a standard-issue biopic. Haynes introduces them in a rough chronology but flows back and forth between stories as if flipping noncontiguously through a family album.

Each persona has a name, some more than one, although none of them is Bob Dylan. Dylan himself makes only a fleeting appearance at the film's apex, although he is a constant presence on the soundtrack. Haynes exploits the power of Dylan's music, but he liberates it from fixed biography. As one of Dylan's avatars says during the movie's rapid-fire opening sequence, "A song is something that works by itself."

The most persistent of I'm Not There's personae is Blanchett's Jude Quinn, who incarnates, uncannily, the surly, gnomic Dylan of the mid-1960s, from his incendiary electric debut at the Newport Folk Festival (here, the "New England Jazz and Folk Festival") through the traumatic motorcycle crash of 1966. Dylan survived the crash, but Jude does not: The movie opens with her body on the autopsy slab. Released by the scalpel that cuts through her chest, the other characters spill out like vital organs, each measured and weighed and carefully replaced, although the body can never again be whole.

Blanchett perfectly captures Dylan's permanent sneer and slurred cadence without imitating his nasal whine, re-creating his famously combative and bitterly hilarious encounters with the press, the public, his audience — anyone who came to him with expectations, which at that point was just about everyone. As the American involvement in Vietnam grows deeper and deadlier, the pressure to speak out on behalf of the younger generation mounts; he responds, not with what he derisively labels the "finger-pointin' songs" of a few years earlier, but with music that reflects the anger, confusion and disillusionment of the times. He turns inward not as a means of escape (though he is immediately accused of such) but out of a belief that setting new words to old tunes is not enough to make the times a-change. Jude's defense of the politics of personal transformation echoes Haynes' own journey from ACT UP activist to engaged auteur, one who realizes that queering the canon can be as powerful as shouting slogans.

Although I'm Not There is littered with citations, Haynes skirts the obvious reference points: Rather than Dont Look Back, Haynes quotes D.A. Pennebaker's samizdat follow-up, Eat the Document. One way to read I'm Not There is as a bootleg biography that skirts primary sources and focuses on the cultural shock waves sent out from his epicenter. The film shifts styles to chart the changing times, from rough-hewn direct cinema to Fellini's languid black and white, to the sardonic pop art of mid-'60s Godard, to the decaying dreamland of Sam Peckinpah's late Westerns. The constant, so to speak, is the movie's protagonist, who congeals as a convincing character in spite of his many guises. Different as the versions of himself are, they're six sides of the same coin.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

I'm Not There

Directed by Todd Haynes

A Weinstein Company release