Bob Dylan has led an eventful life. He’s redefined the protest song, influenced the Beatles, found God, and won an Oscar. The nation’s reigning poet laureate continues to make great music and tour nearly 50 years after his rise to the top of the folk scene. His story is legendary and inspiring. But is it cinematic?
The real-life Dylan is. D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home are towering documentaries chronicling the 1965 British tour and Dylan’s life up until his motorcycle wreck, respectively. That Dylan is charming, mysterious, and inspiring. He is as close to a musical superhero as anyone has come, including Elvis.
But what about the fictional Dylan? Being a natural storyteller, Dylan seemed fit as any to explore himself on a deeper level. For someone who has successfully dodged the press’ attempts to explain his entire being, surely the man himself could provide the best insight.
Unfortunately, existing evidence suggests that he cannot. The role-playing portion of his Renaldo and Clara is widely considered a failure. Then there is the shameful vanity project, Masked and Anonymous. Co-written with director Larry Charles, under the not-so-clever pseudonym Sergei Petrov, Dylan plays a version of himself called Jack Fate. Set against a war-torn future America that resembles Havana meshed with the Bronx, the all-star casts speaks incoherent “poetry” while Dylan poker faces through and endless series of meaningless scenes.
The film is intended to play out like one of Dylan’s more complex songs, such as “Gates of Eden” or “Desolation Row.” Instead, it is reminiscent of a Dylan version of a Bad Hemingway contest, except it’s written by Dylan.
Dylan told Charles not to worry about initial response to the film but to wait for the long-term appreciation. Unless there is a second film decodable with 3-D glasses and playing the audio backwards, that day will never come. Only the most insane Dylan disciples, bereft with multiple mental illnesses, will be able to find value in the effort. The only sliver of redemption is Dylan’s cover of “Dixie,” and it can thankfully be viewed on YouTube, far from the rest of the failure.
Only when Dylan himself isn’t involved in the abstraction does the end result work. I’m Not There, the new film from Todd Haynes, is “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan” and works hard to combine the fantastic and the real. Haynes breaks Dylan’s life into six vignettes played by six different people. The concept is ambitious, but entirely sensible as each distinct chapter is true to its respective Dylan reinvention.
There’s a 10-year-old black boy full of tall tales who thinks he’s Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin); a young 20something Greenwich Village folk music phenomenon named Jack Rollins (Christian Bale); a poet calling himself Arthur Rimbaud who is under some sort of government subcommittee interrogation (Ben Whishaw); a famous actor who portrayed Rollins in a corny biopic, now witnessing his marriage fall apart (Heath Ledger, whose character Robbie Clark’s personality may have split from or become bonded to the folk hero’s during filming); Jude Quinn, a former folk star, fresh off bewildering his listeners by going electric, on a media-frenzied tour of England (Cate Blanchett); and a middle-aged Billy the Kid, who evaded death and now lives in careful seclusion (Richard Gere). None of them are Dylan, yet they could be no one else.
In many moments, the film drags and ventures into Lynchian depths of artistic drudgery. But when it soars, it reaches seemingly unparalleled heights, thanks to the music and personal connections with Dylan lore.
Similar to previous experimental Dylan explorations, it is an immense help to know the legend. Fortunately, for the undefined audience of Haynes’ film, the tidbits here are much more accessible: visits to a dying Woody Guthrie in his New Jersey hospital room; Newport Folk Festival lore coming alive as a Pete Seeger stand-in attempts to slice the electric guitars’ power source with an axe; disillusioned festival onlookers precisely quoting Don’t Look Back‘s equally mystified British youth; Quinn passing along his uppers and downers to the Beatles; and the Rolling Thunder Revue inspired landscape of the Gere scenes and his Basement Tapes era Billy.
By being aware of the scattered facts we can be in on the joke, and yet it is our supposed knowledge that is being toyed with throughout the film. We don’t know Dylan. We’ve never really known him and that’s how things should be. The same message should also be applied to each viewer: Do we want all of our moves to be scrutinized by the public? How silly can “celebrity” be? How can every man find peace and happiness in the face of constant scrutiny? In the end, the music is the star. Let the man be.
Fellini’s self-reflexivity and personal criticism of 8 1/2 is constant throughout the film and receives an exclamation point with a balloon-like Quinn threatening to fly away if not for a rope around his ankle. But it’s Haynes, not Dylan, who makes these private pronouncements on behalf of the artist, adding another curious level to I’m Not There’s mystery. The writer-director has immersed himself in Dylanology, but combines the knowledge with his film-smarts to make the piece work. It takes a real filmmaker like Haynes to do it right and Dylan’s necessary absence lends deeper meaning to the project’s title and success.
And yet he is there, if only in spirit and recorded sound. But what a strong, strange presence it is! As a result, the known Dylans connect quickest. Franklin’s Woody encompasses the unbelievable stories Dylan told after his arrival in New York City; Bale’s Rollins perfectly mimes the young Dylan, slowly bouncing with sincerity while singing for justice and equality for all; Whishaw’s quasi-narrator streams familiar quips in defense of himself and his art; and Blanchett plays “Ballad of a Thin Man” with the identical head nods and floppy piano wrists from the famous ’65 footage while confounding reporters to our delight in other scenes.
The unknown Dylans (beginning chronologically with Ledger) are the most difficult to follow, yet they encompass his most painful elements. These fractions are a man picking up the pieces from the press’ strangulation and a horrific motorcycle wreck. Temporary hermitage may have helped, but the problems are too large to easily repair. One potential path to healing is religion, and Bale’s reborn Pastor John perfectly hyperbolizes the evangelical Dylan, one of the artist’s most confusing and complex periods. When he sings “Pressing On” to a small rec-room congregation, the pain is all but absent and his faith and joy resonate.
Then there are the Gere scenes, the film’s most cryptic, though also deserving of more time. The Rolling Thunder Revue period is a fascinating Dylan tangent of circus, troubadours, whiteface, and collaboration. The setting is there, complete with giraffes and sideshow attractions, but the experiences are not. The closest we get is Jim James, the My Morning Jacket lead singer, dressed in RTR Dylan garb and singing “Goin’ to Acapulco” for a funeral wake. The reclusive Dylan clearly chose to hide here, but the excursion was far too brief and mysterious. Perhaps that’s how it should be. Only Dylan knows, but Haynes convinces us that he too is privy to that knowledge.
I’m Not There is a wandering, magical meditation on the most influential musician of our time and will require multiple views to process its plentiful messages. It may be the most intelligent musical ever made and the layered ambiguity in which it is presented finally accomplishes what Dylan himself has yet to do.