I’m Not There enchants

by Daniel Griffin, Senior Staff Writer

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This film is not Walk the Line. It’s not Ray or Capote. It’s not even really a biopic, at least not in the usual sense of the word. I’m Not There gives us a film about Bob Dylan where the focus is not Bob Dylan—not his life, anyway. Instead, the film’s focus is a complexly structured examination of artistry. We get a dissection of the artistic mind, and we see the interactions of that mind with the outside world. The result of this bold experiment is a far richer film than its biopic predecessors.

The problem with these other biopics mentioned is simple: narrative. All we get is story, story, story. Stories about how bands met, how artists became famous and typically, how drugs played a role in their downfall or rebirth—stories we could read on Wikipedia. Stories so uninteresting and commonplace that most famous people, in any time period, seem to have parallel ones. Part of the blame for this rather large trash pile of poor films lies with the studios for actually making them. The other part lies with the general film audience for simply asking for them.

Most people seek out good stories when they go to the movies. They want to be entertained, amused, bedazzled. And typically, their amusement is peaked by a straightforward narrative that provides cohesive plot points that ultimately drag around the viewer to the end of the film—that or the audience is dazzled with trite tricks and flashy nothingness.

Yet film is often a poor medium to tell stories. With around two hours to tell a story, sometimes even a full human life story, these films become slaves to a plot-based narrative. The camera shoots from uninteresting locations, and few avenues that film is actually very good at exploring (namely visual avenues, spatial explorations or sound editing) are explored. In essence, novels are far better at telling stories than films will ever be. If you want good stories, go read Dickens. If you want new ways to dream, go watch Terrence Malick. So what may have seemed like a digression from I’m Not There is actually an appropriate introduction to the film as it has no real story to speak of. We don’t follow Bob Dylan around as he grows up and becomes famous and then has to deal with that fame. We get pieces of Dylan, played by six different actors, which express particular creative instances throughout his life.

I’m Not There is structured so cleverly as a series of bookends. Certain characters bookend others, creating an emotional and artistically revealing hierarchy of Dylan.

Firstly, the youngest Dylan is named after Dylan’s idol, Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), and the eldest is named after the famous outlaw, Billy the Kid (Richard Gere). Here we get the fringe of Dylan, the most revealed, contrasted with the fact that neither character looks anything like Dylan, with the young, black Franklin and the aged, tattered Gere. These two characters are pointedly named after real characters, as both are in search of who they really are. Neither seems to know, and this mirrors Dylan’s own self-doubt both as a young boy and later, as an object of musical and political criticism. Inside these two Dylans we have the young folk singer, Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), and the actor, Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger). We come closer to the “true” Bob Dylan at this stage, with both characters mirroring the intense fame of the young Dylan and the desolation of the older one. Furthermore, both actors take on a distinctively Dylan-esque appearance, and they overlap most prominently when Clark makes his breakthrough acting performance portraying the musician Rollins.

There are multiple layers of reality here, with Clark and Rollins in one and Guthrie and Billy in another (as they cross paths once in Billy the Kid’s secluded town). Both Clark and Rollins have a young and old version, with the young one becoming famous and the old one living in denial of the young version. We get closer to the real Bob Dylan, yet in actuality, we know far less about these characters than we do Guthrie and Billy the Kid—hence, a deeper submersion into the unexplained artist.

Finally, in the center of these two sets of bookends, the real Bob Dylan stands—or at least the most recognizable version of the Bob Dylan we know, spouting famous Dylan quotes and dancing with the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg. Oddly enough, Cate Blanchett fills this role with a scarily accurate Dylan imitation. However, in reference to her numerous awards for this role, it should be noted that this is almost entirely an imitation of Dylan. Even though it’s a very good imitation, she merely spouts the lines just as Dylan did back in 1966, shown on tapes included in Scorsese’s No Direction Home made a few years ago. Cate Blanchett is a phenomenal actress, but her best work is elsewhere, where more is required than a mere imitation of a real person. Nevertheless, this center axis is that about which every other character and story revolves. And as we reach the center, we get the guarded, cryptic Dylan, the one plagued by boos and jeers at turning from acoustic to electric, in addition to being hailed as one of the greatest musicians ever. Even less is known about this character, and ironically, it’s the character we are most familiar with. The layers of the artist are peeled away to display something even less knowable than the ones on the fringe. We get the mystery of the artist, the blank creative depths.

The last Dylan, Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), gives a sort of poetic narration throughout the film, guiding it in and out of the avenues of emotional and creative layers. He is the audience surrogate, yet he seems cold and plastered against a blank white background. He is the Dylan under our investigation, and he gives no explanations.

I’m Not There is not an easy film. It takes sorting and multiple viewings (I’ve seen it twice) to develop a real sense of what the film is exploring.

Yet, superb films such as this require that kind of diligence and thought yet they reward on such a grander scale. These dreams are bookends of thoughts, personalities, emotions. Perhaps I’m Not There is about the creative mind of the artist, but I prefer to think it explores the creative mind present in everyone.