Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Todd Haynes
Cast :
Cate Blanchett ………. Jude
Ben Whishaw ………. Arthur
Christian Bale ………. Jack / Pastor John
Richard Gere ………. Billy
Marcus Carl Franklin ………. Woody
Heath Ledger ………. Robbie
Kris Kristofferson ………. Narrator
The traditional music biopic usually hits on a certain period of time in any musician or band’s life, gleaming over certain areas and focusing on a core that defines the essence of their career. Walk the Line, Ray, The Doors and many other films have all focused on the peak years of an artist intermixed with the major events that helped make them into who they were. Doing the same for Bob Dylan would probably yield a similar film, but Todd Haynes decided to go in a different direction. Taking a cavalcade of actors going through some of the major events of Dylan’s career, I’m Not There is a distillation of the man and his music.
Christian Bale and Heath Ledger play Dylan, renamed throughout the film into various personas, in his early days. Bale also portrays Dylan later in life after his religious conversion. Marcus Carl Franklin plays Dylan the young man, hitch-hiking from Minnesota to Greenwich Village to be at the epicenter of folk music. Cate Blanchett portrays Dylan at his peak as a superstar while Ben Whishaw is Dylan as a young man, not quite ready to go to Greenwich but not staying in Minnesota. Richard Gere plays Dylan as Billy the Kid, a nod to his supporting role in Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. Following Dylan from his days as a folk artist, his controversial switch to electric guitars and his later conversion to Christianity, it’s fascinating because of the different interpretations of Dylan.
Bale and Ledger tackle the early version of the man, unsure of his fame and eventually becoming quite comfortable in it. It’s interesting to see an Australian and a man from the U.K do flat, Midwestern accents but it’s to their credit that it works masterfully. Bale in particular shows off another new dimension to what’s quickly becoming the best rounded acting resume in Hollywood; he gets early Dylan down well. It’s an interesting contrast to his roles in 3:10 to Yuma and Rescue Dawn earlier in the year, as he plays a man who’s uneasy with fame and just wants to do what makes him the most happy. But the film’s strongest version of Dylan comes from its least likely source: Blanchett.
Blanchett has the most modern Dylan of them all, Dylan at his commercial peak, and nails it to a T. She looks quite convincing in the part, with the hair and wraith-like figure to match, but it’s the little things she does like walk like the man that set her apart. It’s charismatic and dynamic without being clichéd; films about musicians tend to err towards the good side and overlook the dark side of many artists. Blanchett captures the bad side of Dylan remarkably well. The film’s longest focus is on her as Dylan and she owns the screen in a way that adds another feather in her acting cap. Flaws and all, she seems to best capture the essence of the man many consider to be the voice of his generation.
In stark contrast are Franklin and Gere as the titular character. Franklin has Dylan the musician down but seems too country to be a stand-in for a Midwestern kid, unlike Gere whose part seems to be added for another name on the marquee. The film’s focus and longest stories follow Ledger, Bale and Blanchett; the allure of multiple people playing Dylan may have been a nice marketing niche but ultimately three would’ve been enough. The film tries to capture all of Dylan as opposed to his essence. At nearly two and a half hours it becomes burdensome at the 90-minute mark and almost unbearable by the end.
I’m Not There is a must-view for anyone who is a fan of Dylan, and is certainly a unique enough visual experience to make it worthy of most viewers, but ultimately it tries too hard to be radically different than anything else currently in cinemas for it be anything but a curiosity as opposed to a seminal masterpiece.
FINAL RATING (ON A SCALE OF 1-5 BUCKETS):
