During a post-screening Q&A for “I’m Not There,” an audience member at the Telluride Film Festival asked director Todd Haynes if he saw something of himself as an artist in Bob Dylan.
“Which Dylan?” might have proved a quick retort.
By now you know there are six mirages of the protean singer-songwriter in Haynes’ bold tussle with “the many, many lives of Bob Dylan.” The Dylans, a thorny bunch, are inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and youngster Marcus Carl Franklin.
Haynes thought this formal conceit might have been enough to clue most in that what they were about to see would be no run-of-the-mill musician’s biopic.
“I keep thinking that this is maybe the first time of any of my films where the concept, the most experimental, adventurous thing about the whole idea is the reason people want to go see it. That’s why they’re talking about it, and that’s why they want to go see it.
“It’s unlike stuff people are making,” Haynes admitted one afternoon, while running the gantlet at yet another festival in Toronto.
“I just hope there’s a way to make it a little easier for people, where they cannot worry about getting every reference and understanding every word.”
Just in case: The distributor started handing out a pamphlet at theaters.
From Telluride, Haynes headed to the Venice Film Festival where the film won a special jury prize. Blanchett took the best-female-actor award for the prickliest Dylan of all.
“I actually got to watch it in Venice” he said. “I could get into it, which is hard to do in a public screening.”
An eight-minute standing ovation has a way of coaxing some sweet release.
“It looked so beautiful. It sounded so beautiful, the mix sounded so good.”
There are 34 songs on the “I’m Not There” soundtrack. Some, like the title track, are sung by the man himself. Others come via an inviting assortment: Eddie Vedder, Sonic Youth, Jack Johnson, former X man John Doe.
Haynes’ filmography is also a testament to an abiding love of sound and song.
He directed his contraband classic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” years before CD producers of “If I Were a Carpenter” had the genius idea to gather unusual suspects to cover the songs of Karen and Richard Carpenter.
Haynes’ 43-minute rough masterwork (written with former Brown classmate Cynthia Schneider) tells the story of the life and death by anorexia of the soulful, vanilla- perfect singer. The tear-jerking biopic starred Barbie dolls.
His 1998 “Velvet Goldmine” was a loving homage to the glam rock of David Bowie and Iggy Pop that pushed notions of masculinity and style.
Those intimate with Haynes’ work can’t help feeling that there is another character finding its shape before our eyes in “I’m Not There.”
Sitting on a restaurant patio after sneak screenings of “The Savages” at Telluride, writer-director Tamara Jenkins enthused about “I’m Not There.” This, she said, was such a culmination of the themes Haynes had been working in all his films.
“There’s a lot of my work in here,” agreed Haynes. Even his college thesis short, “Assassins: A Film Concerning Arthur Rimbaud,” gets a nod as Ben Whishaw plays a version of the poet.
“So how does that feel?” the 46-year-old director of “Safe” and “Far From Heaven” asks with a smile. “Like I’ve just plumb run out of ideas.”
Hardly.
Which doesn’t mean the masterful shifts of character and visual tones won’t rile some.
If gondola chatter at Telluride provided a barometer of feelings (and it tends to be telling), Haynes’ film seduced some people and infuriated more.
The director is sure people will get stuck on the section featuring Richard Gere as an aging Billy the Kid.
“It’s always been the more debated,” said Haynes of the section which has this Bob avatar escaping into the frontier.
“The literal touchstones of what people want as it relates to the history of Bob Dylan seem to be absent there. It takes a couple of extra steps of dancing.”
But then, the vigorous tango of presence and absence is the guiding dance in Haynes’ film.
