I’M NOT THERE sss
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
To call the film biographical is misleading. If anything, it’s a speculative essay that uses Dylan to comment on his audience and the 60s in general. Haynes, a graduate of the semiotics department at Brown University, isn’t really concerned with Dylan as an individual; rather he presents him as a cluster of signs and texts, spread across six characters embodying phases or distinct aspects of his early career. There’s an 11-year-old black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie; a white folksinger named Jack (Christian Bale) who reaches the mainstream via Greenwich Village and later becomes a born-again Christian; a poet (Ben Whishaw) who exists entirely inside an abstract space and identifies himself as Arthur Rimbaud; an actor named Robbie (Heath Ledger) who plays a fictional version of Jack in a movie; an electrified Dylan known as Jude (Cate Blanchett, giving the best imitation of the bunch) who conquers swinging London; and finally a Dylan who fancies himself Billy the Kid (Richard Gere). By the time the real Dylan appears in extreme close-up at the movie’s end, blowing on his harmonica, he simply registers as one more sign.
As semiology, I’m Not There is hardly impartial. It charts Dylan’s development from precocious kid (Franklin’s Woody Guthrie) to posturing asshole (Blanchett’s Jude) with increasing mockery. Nowhere are the criticisms more pointed than in the depictions of Jude and Robbie: both are blatant misogynists and the latter neglects his wife. Yet neither matches up with the Dylan we see in Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary about his 1965 UK tour (a source Haynes plunders repeatedly). Especially compared to Jude, he’s far more impressive as both a musician and a human being. (On a similar note, Joan Baez comes across as much more subdued and prefeminist in Don’t Look Back than she does in Julianne Moore’s depiction of her, largely because the 60s were more prefeminist than Haynes would have you believe.)
I’ve seen I’m Not There three times now, and apart from the politically correct sections with suffering Claire, I find it both nimble and gripping. But whenever I try to commit myself to any idea about what I think it’s doing, I ultimately balk at having too many choices. You might say I’m not there—at least not yet.v
