Dylan biopic I'm Not There: a ragtag and Bob tale

Director: Todd Haynes
Entertainment grade: E
History grade: D

Bob Dylan is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the last century.

Health

The film opens by invoking Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident of 1966, which marked a turning point in his career. The accident was real – probably. The details are obscure and inconsistent, leading some to questioned whether it happened at all. "There certainly was an accident, or rather an incident," wrote Dylan biographer Howard Sounes. "But it was not as serious as was reported at the time." I'm Not There isn't particularly literal about anything, but it does show Dylan dying after the accident, which in literal terms at least he did not.

Childhood

Back in the 1950s, a young African-American Dylan (Marcus Carl Franklin) rides boxcars and calls himself Woody Guthrie after the folk musician. The scenario is also plainly not literal – for starters, the real Dylan has technically always been a white guy – though it is inspired by Dylan's real-life admiration for Guthrie. Later, there will be a nod to the accurate fact that the real Dylan visited the ailing Guthrie in hospital in 1961.

Casting

Throughout the film, aspects of Dylan are played by six different actors. In addition to Kid Dylan, there's Poetry Dylan (Ben Whishaw), Grumpy Dylan (Christian Bale), Sellout Dylan (Heath Ledger), Cowboy Dylan (Richard Gere) and Speedy Dylan (Cate Blanchett). It's as if you divided Bob Dylan by the Spice Girls. Still, this is a creative and potentially interesting approach to a biopic. Cinema enthusiasts may consequently feel they should try very hard to like it.

Personalities

It takes some trying. At least four of the Dylans teeter unwittingly on the brink of parody. The only Dylans of substance are Kid Dylan and Speedy Dylan, and even Speedy Dylan is – despite the generally excellent reviews afforded to Blanchett's performance – kind of a wazzock. "Perhaps you sold out to God!" says a pre-diet Peter Jackson lookalike, trundling across the screen on a golf cart. "That was Allen Ginsberg, man!" gasps Speedy Dylan, contriving to sound like both Bill and Ted, if Bill and Ted were into beat poetry instead of Van Halen.

Music

Grumpy Dylan plays an electric set at a folk festival and is booed. The real Dylan was booed at the Newport folk festival in 1965, supposedly because he went electric. Real-life witnesses have suggested that the bigger problem was the quality of the amplification or length of the performance. "Some had travelled thousands of miles and paid a lot of money for tickets and what did they get?" asked Al Kooper, Dylan's organist. "Three songs, and one of those was a mess. They didn't give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more." Grumpy Dylan goes through approximately the same conversion to born-again Christianity as the real Dylan did in the late 1970s, though I'm Not There shows him becoming a preacher. For a film that mostly isn't doing stuff all that literally, this is extra-literal. The real Dylan merely recorded a few preachy songs.

Meaning

Instead of probing any of its Dylans or contextualising them in history or culture, I'm Not There leaps erratically back and forth, permitting neither screenplay nor camera to rest on any one thing for long enough to turn it into an idea. Soon, this becomes irritating. Then boring. By the second hour, the film is hurling random magical realist elements around to distract the audience from the fact it just doesn't have much to say. Far from accessing some sort of higher truth about the real Bob Dylan, its tricksy devices serve only to distance it from its subject. The peak of pretentious awfulness is reached when Richard Gere, as Cowboy Dylan, flees a midwestern township full of freaky Halloween children and suddenly finds himself face to face with a nonplussed giraffe. It's bad enough to shoehorn inexplicable zoo creatures into your Bob Dylan movie, but really: Richard Gere?

Verdict

Bob Dylan is a fascinating subject, both as a musician and as a man, but this film's multiple emperors have no clothes.