2007 DVD Review: I'm Not There

Biopics are inherently lame. Not only are their plots hidebound by the known facts of the life of the subject, the time frame of the subject's life insures that the film will be choppy and episodic, with no real momentum built between scenes. Then, there's the crippling inability of the biopic format to answer the question that such films are always asking by their very existence: who is (famous person's name here). This inherent lameness is especially pronounced in biopics about musicians. Visually demonstrating the source of a great musical artist's inspiration, of illustrating the artist's creative process, of showing how the artist's music interacted with the culture around it...the biopic, with its pre-set plot arcs and elliptical structure is singularly incapable of tackling any of these herculean tasks.

So, mad props indeed to filmmaker Todd Haynes, who takes a chainsaw to the very concept of the musical biopic in I'm Not There. His response to the question: "Who is Bob Dylan," would probably be "how can I answer that question if you've got the nerve to ask me?" Haynes' film elides all questions about the quintessence of Bob Dylan the man, or any commitment to a traditional biographical portrait. Instead, Haynes takes as his subject the many artistic persona that Dylan has projected to the world over the years. Hayne's doesn't wan to gain insight into Dylan's psyche or give the viewer a crash course in Dylan's life and influences. Instead, what Haynes is after is something much more unique and interesting: he's using the artistic medium of film in order to represent, in sound and moving image, what it means to experience another artistic medium. The different periods in Dylan's musical career are embodied by different actors, with musical interludes, hallucinations and phantasmagoria that attempt to put the viewer inside a Dylan song, and inside the moment of time when the song was released. A couple of setpieces stand out as particularly sharp: Cate Blanchett's Don't Look Back Dylan emptying an Uzi into the earnest folkies at the Newport Festival, and a white-faced Jim James belting out a mournful rendition of "Going to Acapulco" in a band shell before a crowd of bedraggled Western refugees. The latter scene in particular is a vivid immersion in the apocalyptic paranoia, melancholy, and olde timey theatricality of Dylan's Pat Garret and Billy the Kid era. There might be an inscrutable, grand message here, but the best part of the movie is that there doesn't have to be one for it to be a singular achievement. It's enough to make you forget that Richard Gere is in it.

The film is not always successful: some of the performances verge on parody (and not in a good way...I'm looking at you, Christian Bale) and not every evocation is equally gripping, but the undertaking as a whole is breathtakingly visionary. I'm Not There points the way to a new cinematic approach towards presenting the lives and works of artists, which is a singularly welcome development.