A black child takes to the rails and adopts the name Woody Guthrie. When he spouts off, his words hang on him like a suit he found rummaging a grownup’s closet.
Yet, this folk Woody (newcomer Marcus Carl Franklin) shares his tales – with hobos, bluesmen, a white couple who takes him in after he’s tossed from a boxcar into a river – and all treat him as if he were indeed a man grown and experienced.
*** | dramatic collage
Only a woman of common sense tells the 11-year-old what he needs to hear to become a better artist: “Live your own time, child,” she says, setting down a plate of catfish. “Sing your own time.”
Woody is just one of the Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There.” The extravagant, boldly constructed collage is no more a biopic than the “Wizard of Oz” is a documentary. The film unfolds like a series of sublime vignettes, though not necessarily in the order or manner that some diehard fans of the singer might prefer.
None of the film’s Dylan personas bears the legend’s moniker. Although one, played by a lip-chewing Ben Whishaw, does have the name of influential poet Arthur Rimbaud. Each, however, shoulders the burden of his creativity.
“I’m Not There” is an uncompromising, beautifully wrought essay on identity, artistic and otherwise.
The story of Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) unfolds as a documentary of a folk singer who becomes a legend, before escaping the scene. Jack later reappears as a preacher with a small evangelical ministry.
Bale captures the awkward defiance of a performer who finds his “finger-pointing songs” gaining freakish importance in a national conversation about civil rights and the Vietnam War.
As shape-shifting as its subject, the movie uses a number of films and directors to relate the different Dylans: Fellini’s “8 1/2” and Jean-Luc Godard’s ’60s movies, amonth them.
In the Jack Rollins’ documentary, Haynes’ regular Julianne Moore plays Alice. And you’d be right to think Joan Baez listening to her recount seeing Jack Rollins for the first time. “Who is this ragmuffin toad?” she tells the off-camera documentarian.
You would be just as right to ponder the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who – along with a slew of other thinkers in vogue at the time Haynes’ attended Brown University – investigated the idea of the decentered subject.
Too heady? Then imagine one’s sense of self as an eel that gets slipperier the harder one tries to grasp it.
Making matters knottier, Heath Ledger appears as Robbie. The handsome actor came to prominence depicting Rollins in a 1960s movie. But Robbie’s not just an actor made famous because of a role. His life, too, is a version of Dylan’s.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays his lover Claire in a story that weaves their personal joys and tribulations with those of a nation at war
“I’m Not There” is a house of mirrors that reflects with dizzying insistence the demands of the voracious fan and the survival strategies of the devoured icon.
Cate Blanchett captures the prickliest, Dylan: Jude.
Hair shorn, wearing a black suit and a barbed attitude, Blanchett’s Jude refuses to make sense of his work for thwarted fans or judgmental Brit journalist Mr. Jones (Bruce Greenwood). When Jude appears on stage (a la Dylan’s famed electric guitar assault at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival) most in the audience are appalled.
The Fellini-esque black-and-white of Jude’s tale gives way to a color-rich outlaw yarn, featuring Richard Gere as an aging Billy and Greenwood as a grizzled Pat Garrett. (Dylan provided music and appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 neo-western “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.”)
There’s no narrator to help navigate the twists this film takes, only the potent juxtapositions Haynes, cowriter Oren Moverman and editor Jay Rabinowitz have created.
If you’ve been hankering for a seamless rendering of Bob Dylan’s life, you’ve likely come to the wrong arthouse.
Like Gertrude Stein’s famous quote, Haynes teases the notion of there not being any “there there.” Dylan’s music acts as a different sort of compass.
Some of the songs are sung by the man himself. Others are covered by a number of artists including Mason Jennings, Calexico and Eddie Vedder.
The music won’t tell you where we’re going. But it reminds us why this strange journey matters.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also blogs.denverpost com/madmoviegoer
“I’m Not There”
R for language, some sexuality and nudity. 2 hours, 15 minutes. Directed by Todd Haynes. Written by Haynes and Oren Moverman. Photography by Edward Lachman. Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood. Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
