New York/I'm Not There

Film Forum, Houston Street

On Saturday I finally got to see I’m Not There, the non-documentary film circumscribing the figure of Bob Dylan by Todd Haynes. It’s a stunning movie, one that explores the myths, clichés, and even lies that form the persona of the man born as Robert Zimmerman. Six actors play different aspects, or different periods, of Dylan’s life, including an 11 year old black boy as Dylan’s Woody Guthrie doppelgänger, and Cate Blanchett as the acerbic Don’t Look Back Dylan.


Don't Look Back, Allen Ginsburg in background

The latter, of course, refers to the ground breaking direct cinema film by D.A. Pennebaker (who was a teacher of mine at Cooper Union). Pennebaker’s masterpiece, while presumably a fly on the wall peek at Dylan on the road, probably furthers the mythology of Bob Dylan more than any other film. It’s a knowing collaboration between two ambitious artists, each with a profound understanding of the power of the camera to document and manipulate.


Cate Blanchett on screen in Film Forum

All of the six visions of Dylan are effective, but Cate Blanchett’s performance as the wild-haired skinny-legged black and white Dylan of the mid-sixties is amazing and has to be seen to be believed. Her sly smiling gaze at the camera as the film ends, is brilliant—Dylan, as the ultimate joker, however much he may have been victimized by celebrity, the press, and the insatiable blood lust of his fans. There’s lots of humor in I’m Not There, despite the art film gravity—Dylan and the mop-topped Beatles rolling down a hill, and Allen Ginsburg (another great joker) riding alongside Dylan’s limo. The obvious reference is to the wonderful Beatles mock documentary A Hard Day’s Night, while Ginsburg, way back then, made a cameo appearance in Don’t Look Back.

Although Haynes is dealing with an American icon through and through, I’m Not There is a film suffused with the spirit of the French New Wave, particularly Jean Luc Godard’s Masculin Feminin another film that veers between a verité style and a deconstruction of the conceits of cinematic storytelling. There are also Felliniesque moments with costumes and freaks, and the outlaw segment with Richard Gere is all McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the early Robert Altman film. The references go on and on, and the the bones of the film will undoubtedly be picked clean by film buffs and Dylanologists.


Walking through Soho after the film. Numerous scenes in the film
were set in the streets near Film Forum in Greenwich Village.

The one persona, however, that’s not there in I’m Not There, is the latest incarnation of Bob Dylan, the grizzled veteran whose last few albums have plumbed the depths of American music with songs as strange and enigmatic as those from his Basement Tapes era. The story is not over as Dylan writes—songs and memoirs—and continues to tour and tour as if there’s nothing else left to do. It may not be Woody Guthrie’s hobo boxcar that Dylan rides from town to town, but its a long train curling into the night, nevertheless.