I'm Not There (2007)

Director Todd Hayne’s film is a collage of Bob Dylan. It’s not standard biography, in fact its highly interpretive and fictionalized, but endeavors to capture the essence of the man and his music, or more specifically of the many roles Dylan played in his life, and the many lenses through which he can be interpreted. Marcus Carl Franklin plays Dylan as a young black boy of about eleven who calls himself Woody Guthrie, and even though its 1959 talks as though it’s the depression, this is the artist as Fake. Ben Whishaw is Arthur The Poet. Christian Bale is Jack The Prophet, a one time Greenwich village folk idol who later in life becomes a Pentecostal preacher, we see all this through the lense of an early 1980's documentary with Haynes favorite Julian Moore one of the prominent talking heads. Heath Ledger is Robbie ‘The Electric’ a popular actor with a strained marriage who got his start playing Jack The Prophet in a mid 60's movie. Richard Gere is The Outlaw, literally a middle aged Billy the Kid living on the down low in rural Riddle, Missouri. Finally in the films most famous bit of casting Cate Blanchett is Jude The Ghost, not a spirt but the amorphous Dylan of the middle 60's. A unique tapestry of a film that may have taken me a little while to get used to but which ultimately I enjoyed. The funeral dirge version of ‘Going Down to Aacapulco’ during the Richard Gere sequence is the most powerful moment in the film. Four out of Five.