None Of Us Is There

There is a peculiar poignancy in watching I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ film based upon the life of Bob Dylan, in Minnesota. This is the home Dylan repudiated, along with his name, his family, and his faith. It’s long been a sore point for many here: that one of the greatest songwriters of our era has shrugged off this place, making it nothing but a minor footnote in his life. Perhaps now, the wound will close. Because I’m Not There makes the argument that Dylan belongs nowhere and to no people or religion. He is anchored neither to place nor time.

Haynes accomplishes this by using six different actors, ranging from a young African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) to a woman (Cate Blanchett) to a virile, robust young man (Heath Ledger), in the role of the film’s central figure. [The other Dylan avatars: Ben Winshaw, Christian Bale, and Richard Gere.] None but Blanchett — ironically, the most convincing — makes an effort to look or speak like Dylan. And each has a different name in the film, as if they are splintered personalities whose ownership of one musician’s body overlap. In a way, they are.

These characters appear in merry-go-round fashion, representing the apprentice, the poet, the philosopher, the activist, the family man, the star, the preacher, and the wanderer. Some events from Dylan’s life, such as his offensive speech to the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1963, are enacted authentically. Others, such as the visit he actually made to a dying Woody Guthrie as an adult, which is depicted in the film as a fleeting, traumatic childhood event, clearly have been revised. And his stint as a born-again Christian becomes here the end of one alter’s story, rather than one more rock in the bumpy road of an erratic life.

This is not an easy movie to watch. Just as the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Laura Equivel demands of the reader both absolute trust and hard work, I’m Not There asks viewers to suspend all expectations about linear narrative coherence. "Let it wash over you," producer Christine Vachon (of Killer Films) instructed the audience — utterly without irony — at the Walker Art Center’s premiere in early November.

That Vachon was paraphrasing William Hurt’s drug-addled character in The Big Chill seemed unintentional. The advice is pretty good: you must relax and give in if you are to understand how sturdy little Marcus Carl Franklin, the boy told to "sing about [his] own time" becomes, ultimately, the wifty, slender, long-nailed and alabster white Cate Blanchett, railing against the fans storming her/his car and smoking with a mad, suckling greed.

It is interesting, however, that for all his experimental strategies, Haynes begins and ends I’m Not There in the most traditional of American ways — with the hero riding on a train, pondering first his future and then his past. And each thread of the film is rendered startlingly in the style of a great director: Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Peckinpah (for whose Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Dylan actually wrote "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.") Some are more successful than others: the Godard sequence in particular, saturated with color and starring a brilliant, luminous Charlotte Gainsbourg, is a joy to watch. There is logic in this chaotic swirl of scenes and the way to find it probably, perversely, is to be both relaxed and alert — accepting and ready to reach for connections that aren’t in evidence. The film is a kaleidoscope that likely speaks to each of us in a different way.

Ultimately, it seems to me, I’m Not There isn’t about Bob Dylan at all. He appears, in person, only in one brief, closeup harmonica sequence at the very end. Rather, this is a film about reinvention and resurrection, about disillusionment with one’s own choices, about looking for answers and finding they are always just around the next bend. Nothing new here — it’s all just that messy business of being human. But Haynes has given us a unique lens through which to view the experience. And he’s chosen one man — one of us, in fact — to be the literal emblem of this odd, swiftly changing life that’s sometimes so difficult to understand.

“Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all in one room,” says Richard Gere playing Billy, the sixth and final Dylan alter-ego to appear on screen. And for a moment, in that darkened theater, they are.

I’m Not There opens at the Uptown Theater on November 21.