Reviews > I'm Not There

Any time a real person is portrayed in movies, something gets lost in the translation. People are just too multifaceted. They live lives that don’t necessarily follow the single trajectory three-act structure that audiences most easily digest. In "I’m Not There," director Todd Haynes does his damnedest to try to fix that.

Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw are all Bob Dylan… though some more than others. There’s no doubt that Blanchett will be the one attracting attention and any award nominations. Her impression of Bob Dylan is spot on, and more importantly, her very presence is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat. And the others? Bale’s vocal and facial work is accurate, but it feels much more like a Saturday Night Live-type impression, compared to Blanchett’s effortless Dylan manner of speaking and moving. What’s more, Bale’s character is completely neglected for a great portion of the film, and his little bit of the narrative goes relatively unresolved. Young Marcus Carl Franklin is quite good for an actor of his age, and he too, is underused. Heath Ledger probably gets the second largest share of screen-time after Blanchett, and his role of “Dylan the Movie Star and Deadbeat Dad” is fascinating, if at times hard to relate to. Ben Whishaw serves as little more than a Greek chorus who occasionally provides some Dylanesque dialogue and cynical attitude. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they shot all of his part in a single day, he had so little to do. Richard Gere’s segment undoubtedly drags compared to the rest, but at the same time it feels somehow necessary to bring a completion to Dylan’s story.

The film is a jumble of ideas that’s not necessarily intended to be taken too literally. I feel I may have been at a great advantage owing to the fact that I know relatively little about the real Bob Dylan (“whoever that is, man” I imagine Cate Blanchett’s character saying). If you’re expecting another straightforward troubled singer biopic like "Ray" or "Walk the Line," you’ve come to the wrong place. Instead of telling a simplified true story, Haynes’ film asks questions about what makes an identity and what celebrity can do to someone too slippery to pin down. These questions are not necessarily more important than the fascinating life stories of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, but they certainly feel like new ground being covered in a (fairly) mainstream biopic.

One can’t help but guess that Haynes is a big fan of Fellini. The circus folk townspeople of Riddle, Missouri harken back to "La Strada," while the groovy early-sixties nightlife and infidelity amongst celebrities brings "8 1/2" to mind. "I’m Not There" has a lot more in common with those wonderfully confusing European films than it does almost any contemporary American film that comes to mind. This film is a bit sprawling and unwieldy at first but gradually the structure and rhythm grow on you. About an hour in, I found myself wondering how Haynes was going to wrap everything up in a satisfactory way. I think I’m still wondering how he did it or even if he did it. Regardless, it’s an incredibly ambitious experiment that’s well worth seeing.