I’m Not There

I'm Not There (2007) is a film about perspective—Bob Dylan's perspective on himself, director Todd Haynes' perspective, the pop culture perspective, the audience perspective. It's also a film about representation—how Dylan has chosen to represent himself, how we have chosen to represent and fabricate and mold him in our own minds and imaginations. Finally, this film envisions Dylan's life through the metaphoric lens of his songs.

I'm Not There is rarely linear and never literal in its narration of Dylan's life. Dylan himself is never named, but people with other names associated with his life and music appear, each representing a particular phase of his life. Although there is a generally forward-moving progression from his early years to his marriage and divorce and his conversion to Christianity and even up to the Never-Ending Tour, the film moves back and forth among different periods of his career. Certain periods receive more attention than others—for instance, the 1965-1966 years as brilliantly portrayed in the figure of Jude Quinn by Cate Blanchett. Certain periods prove more interesting than others—for instance, the sections dealing with Dylan's marriage and family life are the least interesting, while in many ways the greatest excitement comes in the portrayal of a young Dylan by a 12-year old black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie and who carries a guitar in a case labeled "This Machine Kills Fascists," just as Guthrie did.

Later in the film the Dylan character, especially as portrayed by Heath Ledger (as film actor Robbie Clark), is not particularly likable. Overcome by fame or ego or ennui, he tells his wife and friends that a woman could never be a songwriter. Away on tour, he never manages to call home often enough, and there is the sense that he is caught up in his own image as an actor, an image separate from the one he fills at home. Also later in the film, the character Billy the Kid, portrayed by Richard Gere, seems lost and out of touch with the world and inhabits what appears to be a make-believe old frontier town full of circus characters named after songs and characters from The Basement Tapes. The citizens of the town are upset that a super-highway is slated to pass through the middle of town, forcing them all to move away. Here it is as if Dylan has sought shelter from the demands of the real world in a fantasy land that makes its own claims on him. The modern world in the form of a super highway threatens to wipe out the American folk tradition, as represented by the town and its people as well as by the songs of The Basement Tapes on which the town is based). As Billy the Kid, we see a Dylan character in middle age, wondering where his career and life have gone, looking for ways to bring them back to life.

The film gives us seven different versions of Dylan, portrayed by six actors (Marcus Carl Franklin, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw). None of the "Dylan" characters is named Bob Dylan. Instead they have names associated with his songs, interests, or periods of his life. One, Robbie Clark, is a film actor in the style of James Dean—not a song writer. Cate Blanchett (who brilliantly dominates the film) portrays Jude Quinn in imitation (or emulation) of scenes from the Don't Look Back period of Dylan's life. Jude is an allusion to the Judas insult hurled at Dylan during the Royal Albert Hall concert, for playing electric music instead of acoustic folk. "Quinn" comes from Dylan's song "The Mighty Quinn." Blanchett doesn't so much imitate Dylan as she riffs on him, her own version of the singer, a brilliant rendition. Ben Whishaw portrays a character named Arthur Rimbaud, named for the 19th-century French poet whom Dylan admires and was influenced by, especially in the songs from Blood on the Tracks. Marcus Carl Franklin is great as Dylan during his Woody Guthrie years—when he was first learning folk music and capturing attention. He rides the rails, plays for hoboes, and embodies the vision that Dylan imagined and invented for himself as a young man—the Woody Guthrie avatar, taking into himself and trying to encompass the entire American folk and blues tradition. In an early wonderful scene, "Woody" plays "Tombstone Blues" with two black men sitting on the front porch of an old shack. One of the men is Ritchie Havens. In another, he is befriended by a wealthy white woman who invites her friends over to hear Woody play. It's clear she sees in him the unformed and primal genius of folk music—she sees in him a particular image, one she believes she has discovered and therefore holds claim over, already an image that he will have to resist and struggle against, that she and others like her will urge him to fill long after he has moved elsewhere.

Director Todd Haynes focuses on image and representation throughout the film. Not only does he do this in the way he structures the film, and in his choice of metaphoric rather than literal characters who stand for various periods of Dylan's life, but also through his portrayal of the Dylan figures' struggle with what fans and patrons and other admirers wish him to be, with his own continuing sense of entrapment in one persona after the other, his constant desire for renewal and rebirth.

The Dylan that Haynes gives us is a chimerical genius. This Dylan too is a representation, Haynes' version of the real man. Even if this film can't literally explain the real man—the chimerical genius song writer—it intensively evokes his brilliance and makes beautiful use of his words and images and characters.

Much of the joy of the film comes from Dylan's music itself, whether in Dylan's own performances or those of others. The film opens with "Stuck Inside a Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)." Late in the film we hear songs from his most recent album Modern Times. The film never wavers from this focus on Dylan's music, which form the heart and mind of the film.

There is no such thing as a human life that can be easily or clearly portrayed. Who says what we are? What do our acts and words and relationships have to do with the identity we claim for ourselves? How do the ways other people see us constitute a life any less important that what we think ourselves to be? Haynes rejects linear, monovalent biographical identity and instead gives us a multivalent self—the self that we want to see, the self that invents itself, the self that hides, the self that speaks through art.