I’m Not There
I don’t want to be too tough on this experimental, half-cocked Bob Dylan biopic, with six actors embodying six different Dylan personas. It’s occasionally engaging for seconds at a time! I liked the tracking shot where the callow folkies express their ridiculous outrage that their idol has gone electric. There’s a fetching coffee-shop flirtation between Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg that hints at a unifying narrative that never materializes. The great, still-underrated Bruce Greenwood has some fine moments as a BBC radio interviewer who tries to pin Cate Blanchett-as-Dylan down. And yes, Blanchett makes a fine Dylan — jaunty, volatile and standoffish.
Otherwise, “I’m Not There” is unwatchable. It’s so diffuse that you could walk in a half-hour before it’s over, sit through the credits and then watch the beginning, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. There’s hardly even any music to sustain you, even though Dylan gave the project his blessing. The six-different-actors gimmick is as cheeky and overreaching as you’d expect. I trudged to the movie dutifully, knowing I’d likely leave the theater two hours later feeling like I hadn’t seen a movie at all, and even so, I was disappointed, mostly because I’ve been an ardent defender of Todd Haynes even at his most outré (”Velvet Goldmine”). When he recreated shots from “Citizen Kane” in his treatise on glam rock, it was ballsy and exciting — his gleeful referentiality enriches his work. But in “I’m Not There” he apes that insufferable monument to art-film indulgence, Fellini’s “8 1/2.” An apt metaphor for what Haynes is up to — in the most depressing way possible. I look forward to renting Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home” for a cogent thought or two about Dylan.