I'm Not There

It was around about the point where Heath Ledger’s post-motorcycle crash beard ‘n’ shaded shithead ‘Dylan’ started ranting on about the futility of protest and, apropos of nothing, women’s inherent poetic weakness that the middle-aged couple sitting behind me decided to walk out. A small smattering of others followed their lead throughout the rest of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Afterwards, in the foyer, I overheard at least three people describe it as ‘the worst film I have ever seen’.

To a certain extent, they were right. I’m Not There is irritating, over-long, pretentious, confusing and elitist. But it is also funny, brilliant, thought-provoking, ambitious and, occasionally, genuinely exhilarating. It certainly does not sit cosily next to Walk The Line in a ‘Heartbeat’ approved vidi-identity parade of ‘Your Favourite Memories of Yesteryear’. Good. The reason why Dylan continues to engage and fascinate, the reason why this cinema is full of almost as many 16-year-olds as it is 55-year-olds, is precisely because he is impossible to wrap up in a mop-topped reunion ‘all the hits’ tour package, and to attempt to do so in cinematic form would be almost as insulting to his genius as the suit-and-briefcase nod-a-long fests his soul sucking arena gigs have become.

So we get, famously, six different actors playing six different ‘Dylans’, including – yes! – a woman and a black kid. Some are terrific (Blanchett, Ledger), some competent but superfluous (Bale), and some bloody awful (Gere). The idea is a good one, though hardly as revolutionary as it has been portrayed in some quarters, and anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of Dylan’s discography should be able to recognise which era is which, even without the help of the soundtrack.

The narrative, if there is such a thing, skips around from decade to decade, much as Dylan did himself in the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, and is interspersed with collaged news reels and footage echoing the context within which his records were made. Ben Whishaw’s ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ Dylan, cut-and-pasting quotes and lyrics at off-screen interrogators, is the hook on which the surrounding melee hangs, and lends the film its only semblance of sequential structure.

Interestingly, Haynes makes no attempt to distinguish between the fact and the mythology that surrounds Dylan, so we get the motorcycle crash, we get Pete Seeger and his axe, we get the proto-hobo box-carring his way across Americana. And why not – these now-cherished myths are just as much a part of what ‘Bob Dylan’ has become in cultural terms as the plain reality of Robert Zimmerman from Duluth, Minnesota. In the soon-to-become clichéd-but-damn-it-why-not-one-more-time Tony Wilson phrase: "If it's a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend".

As Haynes has admitted himself, in order to convey the sheer shock and confusion that Dylan wrought in parts of his life, he had to “render the past by not simply replicating it… You play some kids today the recordings of, say, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan went electric, and they'll say, 'Well, what's so revolutionary about that? It just sounds like rock'n'roll music'.” This approach does not always work – the Billy the Kid pantomime scenes are almost painful in their over-stretching for figurative meaning – but it is to Haynes’ credit that it is in these attempts to “transcend” the documented history that the film reaches its highest peaks.

The scene at Newport is truly spine-tingling. Firing machine guns at the audience possibly rings too hard on the ATTENTION! THIS IS A METAPHOR bell, but the shift in the film’s volume and intensity when the band finally do get around to playing the music really does succeed in channelling the wave of frenzied bewilderment that must have swept over the audience at that Newport gig when it turned out that Dylan really didn’t want to work on Maggie’s Farm no more. And the nightmare hallucinations of the journalist whose persistent pressing turns him into the ‘Mr Jones’ of 'Ballad of a Thin Man' certainly manages to demonstrate the fear and loathing that Dylan at times both instigated and suffered. The message seems to be that something was indeed happening here, but that even Dylan himself wasn’t always entirely sure what it was.

For a film about Bob Dylan to produce that self-same reaction in parts of its audience fifty years later is nothing but evidence that Haynes’ approach is on the right path. I’m Not There is not a perfect film. Like Dylan himself, it sometimes reaches too far and misses. But isn’t that the whole point? For when it, and he, hits, it is truly something to behold, and treasure.