KEY POINTS:
I'M NOT THERE
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Kris Kristofferson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore
Director: Todd Haynes
Running time: 135 mins
Rating: M (sex scenes, offensive language)
Screening: Berkeley, Hoyts, Rialto, SkyCity
Rating: * * * *
Verdict: An unconventional but exhilarating rumination on Bob Dylan by a filmmaker who really gets him.
"[Stuck Inside of Mobile With The] Memphis Blues Again", off 1966's Blonde on Blonde, was lodged in my memory as a slow, haunting wail. But seconds into this boundary-stretching fantasia, I was hearing it for the first time. It rocks.
Dylan does that. The albums, even the bad ones, yield new riches each time you dig them out. And Haynes' film, dressed as a biopic but actually an extended riff on its subject, constantly illuminates Dylan by providing new angles of view.
If his music has never made the hair stand up on the nape of your neck, you may not get this film. If it has, you will, because it's made by a man who gets Dylan. You may not like all of it - it's sometimes flatulent or dull or a bit too knowing. But you'll argue into the night over which bits work and which don't and you'll admit that it is not to be missed.
The title, that of an obscure and unreleased Dylan song, is a clue to the film's playful tone. There's nobody called Bob Dylan in I'm Not There and yet he's everywhere, and not just in the soundtrack (his own versions of his songs and covers). The film gives us at least four incarnations of the idea of Dylan: Bale plays the Greenwich Village coffeehouse sensation as a man called Jack Rollins who later, in the film's sole truly snide touch, emerges as a revivalist preacher in California; Ledger, embodying the Dylan ill-at-ease with fame, isn't even a musician, but a movie star trying to keep his relationship with Claire (Gainsbourg) on the rails; Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid (Dylan scored a film about him and, after all, has always been an outlaw spirit).
There's even a character called Woody Guthrie (a folk musician Dylan always acknowledged as his principal muse) but he's played by an African-American, the barely post-pubescent Franklin. He introduces himself to another character by name; "Just like the singer," comes the response.
In the film's most audacious touch, Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn -- her hunched shoulders, Afro, shades and truculent, cryptic utterances perfectly recalling the Dylan who left the mainstream press floundering. More male than the men, she's also somehow more Dylan than Dylan. And she's mesmerising.
The film, then, is less a portrait of Dylan than a meditation on how he defies portrayal. And it's replete with enough self-referential allusions to keep trainspotters busy for years: is "Jude" a reference to "Judas", the name the newly electric 1966 Dylan was branded as in London? Or to his Jewishness (the Nazis' word for Jew is "Jude")? Or both?
The great thing is that none of this matters. The film's non-linear structure and the haunting, brilliant final shot announce that this is neither biography nor documentary. It's a exhilarating, poetic rumination on the most enigmatic, charismatic figure in modern music. And, like any Dylan album you want to name, it is a work of at least partial mastery. Peter Calder
