MOVIE REVIEW

The sum of Dylan's 6 parts

With mix of actors playing pop icon, Haynes' film adds up to impact

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Alternately thrilling and exhausting, "I'm Not There" bills itself as "inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan." This should be taken two ways.

First, it's inspired by the ever-mythic songwriter in that all six lead actors play different aspects of Dylan's career/personality/worldview.

Marcus Carl Franklin, a young African American actor who looks about 10, plays Dylan the yarn-spinning, Woody-Guthrie-imitating acoustic troubadour (lending new meaning to Steve Martin's joke about being born a poor black child). British actor Ben Whishaw plays Dylan as poet Rimbaud, the core of Dylan's most inscrutable linguistic personality. Christian Bale mumbles and rants hypnotically in Dylan's late folk period and Christian conversion. Cate Blanchett mimics Dylan '66 brilliantly, down to the effeminate hand gestures, giant hair, dope sickness and black suits. Heath Ledger riffs on our man's domestic tensions, shifting from is-it-Woodstock to is-it-Malibu, his character standing in for Dylan's '70s movie-star-level fame. Richard Gere plays Dylan the self-invented outlaw, an everyday loner in a town called Riddle (hah!), whose inhabitants scan like extras in an antebellum Western that Luis Buñuel never got around to making. Julianne Moore does the Joan Baez part, Michelle Williams stops by as Edie Sedgwick (or is that Nico?) and David Cross plays Allen Ginsberg, something he needs to do in his own Ginsberg biopic. (Dylan nerds owe it to themselves to see this allegorical juggernaut, oh, five or six times this weekend.)

Second, the film is inspired by Dylan in that the urge to do justice to one of the prime movers of late-20th-century Western culture has prompted director Todd Haynes to deliver his finest work. Careening from one character to the other, bouncing from era to era with a controlled mania, blending corny, almost shticky lyrical references with gorgeous, subtle filmmaking, "I'm Not There" stacks up the images and allusions until you can't look back, the ghost of electricity howling through the bones of its frames.

Haynes has done this before. His love-it-or-loathe-it 1998 film, "Velvet Goldmine," did the same with glam rock — fictionalizing real people, combining characters, spot-the-reference storytelling. But the polish and verve of "I'm Not There" makes "Goldmine" look like a demo (it helps that even the most obscure aspects of Dylan's life and work are better known than anything about David Bowie, and that Haynes uses Dylan's music all over the place, something Bowie wouldn't allow).

And the subject seems to have prompted every actor to step up his or her game. Blanchett's whippet-thin hipster — giggling with the Beatles, whining about a grueling tour, vomiting all over the "8 1/2" landscape — will get all the attention, but everyone is terrific.

Bale, a "Goldmine" vet, essays the limits of folk music beautifully and is commanding yet vulnerable as he leads a largely black choir through a hymn years later, arms raised, snakeskin boots tapping. Franklin displays exceptional emotional command for a child actor, revealing just the right kind of hurt and revelation when he's urged to scrap his hobo act and "live your own time."

The relationship between Ledger and his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg, folding in aspects of Dylan's early girlfriend Suze Rotolo and wife Sara Lowns Dylan) is finely wrought even if some images are ham-fisted.

But it's during the enigmatic Gere sequences — with their allusions to the Band, "Masked and Anonymous," the Civil War, "Renaldo and Clara," the Rolling Thunder tour and Dylan's own Western obsession — that drive home that "I'm Not There" is the closest we're going to get to a snapshot of Dylan's brain, an unknowable country folks will be trying to map as long as his songs are sung. Pretty cool, that.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926

Rating:R for language, some sexuality and nudity. Running time:2 hours, 15 minutes. Theaters: Alamo Village, Arbor, Dobie.

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CD review

Various Artists - 'I'm Not There Original Soundtrack'

(Sony)

The good news is that this all-star cast of artists doesn't do anything really awful with any of these songs. The bad news is, well, nobody does anything really awful with the songs. The arrangements are universally safe and professional, Dylan as reimagined by folks with public radio totebags. The "Million Dollar Bashers" (Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, Television guitarist Tom Verlaine, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboardist John Medeski and Dylan bassist Tony Garnier) back up everyone from Stephen Malkmus and Eddie Vedder to Chan "Cat Power" Marshall and Karen "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" O. It's all dwarfed by Dylan himself singing the title track, reminding you that yes, these are indestructable songs, but that voice has it's own mystic tone, all about confusion and looking for an exit.

- Joe Gross