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I'm Not There director Todd Haynes courageously uses six actors to portray all the facets of Dylan - but only one steals the show, writes Peter Bradshaw . The British chat show host Michael Parkinson tells an anecdote about being at a top Sydney restaurant one night: who should he see at the next table, dining alone? None other than the hunch-shouldered, frizzy-haired, shades-wearing legend himself, Bob Dylan.
Parkinson had long pined to get Dylan on his show and with nothing to lose, Parkinson decided boldly on a direct approach.
The restaurant fell quiet as he walked over to Dylan's table, where the icon was concentrating ferociously on his meal. Parkinson delicately leaned over to speak. "Ahem, Mr Dylan, I -" "He ain't here," snapped the non-interviewee, without looking up. The meeting was at an end, and Mr Parkinson tactfully withdrew.
Much of Dylan's enigma, his refusal to be tied down and his authentic artist-hauteur is summoned up in that reply, when he refused to speak as if screening out a phone call. Better than "I'm not there", or indeed "It ain't me", this might even have made a better title for Todd Haynes's latest picture: an idiosyncratic tribute to the many faces of Bob Dylan.
It's not a conventional biopic but a cine-portrait, casting a string of actors to play the many facets of Dylan - and even these are not actually Dylan but Dylan-variants, Dylan-figures with different names. Haynes weaves in genuine songs with hints and scraps, quotations and references; echoes of images, ideas and album covers. Amid it all, Dylan himself remains elusive.
Marcus Carl Franklin plays Woody, an 11-year-old African-American boxcar-rider who symbolises Dylan's debt to Woody Guthrie. Christian Bale plays Jack Rollins, the early folk-guitar hero. Ben Whishaw is the poet Arthur Rimbaud, depicting a move from the political to the personal.
Heath Ledger is Robbie, a counterculture movie actor depicting Dylan's dark side: selfish, reactionary, misogynist. Richard Gere plays Billy, the ageing hobo in retreat from this wicked world.
Most scene-stealing of all is Cate Blanchett, who gives a gender-bending performance as Jude, the Dylan who played the "Judas" tour of England and rejected unplugged folk for loud electric guitars. Only Blanchett and Bale do actual Dylan impersonations - and Blanchett's is better. In fact, it's brilliant.
The movie shows these personae in parallel, not in sequence; the action intercuts between their existences, implying a timeless universality of what these characters signify in Dylan's creative makeup. It's a Godardian technique which repudiates the typical biopic assumption that the essential truth about someone can be told in a linear couple of hours. But it is also, I suspect, the technique of an awestruck admirer of Dylan who fears the lese-majeste of a direct approach and the Parkinson-style rebuff.
His conceit does justice to Dylan's fugitive charisma - although Dylan himself did his best to bugger up this fugitive charisma with his appearance in the monumentally bad 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, worryingly playing much the same sort of Dylan-character offered here: an outlaw troubadour called Jack Fate. It's a cult classic of awfulness about which Dylan fans are globally in denial, though this movie may help to expunge it from the record.
I'm Not There addresses an unfashionable subject, easily mocked: the artist's need to change, and evolve, in order to survive. Blanchett's performance as Transitional Dylan is the key. Not merely does she mimic him with terrific sympathy and wit, but she shows Dylan's puzzlement and anger at boneheaded middlebrow interviewers who triumphantly alight on what they consider to be a killer objection: evidence that he has changed his music and changed his mind.
A sneering BBC reporter (played by Bruce Greenwood) obtusely insists on finding hypocrisy and insincerity in Dylan, unable to judge the music on its own terms. "Do your early stuff, man!"
I was reminded of the documentary The US Vs John Lennon, which showed haughty interviewers attempting to patronise Lennon by preferring his "old" style over the "new" - while clearly not understanding either.
In the end, this may be a movie for Dylan fans and Dylanologists - not an easy constituency to please. It is a powerfully reverent exercise in remystification, an attempt to waft some of the clouds of glory back around the great man, clouds that might have dispersed in recent years.
There is a fine sense of period, of the dark and hypocritical side of the 60s - but some of the faux-interviews are a bit Spinal Tap-ish, and the film does not have the sublime sense of form and overt passion that marks Todd Haynes's great work, Far From Heaven.
A long time ago, Haynes got into trouble for another musical picture: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a no-budget retelling of Karen and Richard Carpenter's lives using Barbie dolls. That showed a campness and irony that Haynes may be trying to get away from: he too, after all, is surely allowed the artist's prerogative of change. Yet it had a kind of courage - the courage to offend an alive-and-suing star - that the oblique persona-collage of I'm Not There does not have.
Cate Blanchett is the movie's jewel, and also its problem. It was great casting, and her eerily exact inhabiting of Dylan's mannerisms is an inspired alienation effect. Whenever she is not on screen, however, the voltage-level drops, and her presence has the unfortunate effect of making the male contribution look ordinary.
Yet if Blanchett had been the only Dylan on screen, it might have looked like an overstretched gimmick. Haynes has pitched her at the right length: a super-strength cameo. Her Dylan is intelligent, confident, artificial in the best sense: a strong contender for the big awards, and a good reason to see the film.
