In Sight/Cinema & Arts: Showing the multiple faces of a man

BY PHILIP BRASOR, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I'M NOT THERE

Opens April 26 ・136 minutes

・Cinema Rise in Tokyo and elsewhere

Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There," an exploration of the life, times and the public personae of Bob Dylan, is an extremely entertaining movie, filled to the brim with compelling, offbeat ideas distributed among multiple narrative modes. It's a lot like a Dylan song, in fact. Nevertheless, its entertainment value may appeal to a narrow audience, namely Dylan aficionados and rock critics. The more you know about the prickly singer-songwriter going into the movie, the more you take away from it, and the less you know, the less you'll understand.

More people know about Dylan these days than ever before, thanks to what could be called the "Bob Dylan self-promotion industry."

"General interest in Dylan never goes away," said Haynes in a recent phone interview from his home in Portland, Oregon, "but it's compounded by the quality of work he's put out recently, starting with his last three albums and continuing with his book and his radio show. He stands for the history of American popular music in all its variety, as somebody who acts as a link between the earliest traditional music and contemporary music."

Dylan, as both an artist and a pop culture icon, has done this by reinventing himself over and over since he first emerged on the New York folk music scene. Thus, Haynes uses six different actors to represent either phases in his career or aspects of his musical development. When Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), an 11-year-old black boy, hops a freight train and starts singing his protest songs, he embodies not only the spirit of the hobo troubadour suggested by Dylan's own hero, Woody Guthrie, but the masquerades that a Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, assumed when he arrived in New York's Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. "It's 1959, and this boy's singing about boxcars," comments a matronly Southern black woman wryly.

Haynes keeps the different storylines separate, so if you connect Woody's tale to that of Billy (Richard Gere), the outlaw who stumbles upon what critic Greil Marcus called the "old weird America" in the form of a wild west town called Riddle, it's because they both seem to be located in a past that Dylan only imagined in song.

"Richard's story was the most abstract," explained Haynes. "I wanted a famous movie star for that character, somebody with a mini-history of American cinema etched into the lines of his face. And besides, Richard is probably the biggest Dylan fan."

Of all the principals, Gere is the only actor who's a contemporary of the singer, but it's Cate Blanchett who, despite bending genders, gets the most conventional biopic role. The storyline about Jude Quinn, a gangly, hyperactive rock singer, is based on Dylan's infamous electric tour of Britain in 1966. While the direction makes fun of the Swinging '60s, the dialogue parodies Dylan's brain-twisting poetry and media-baiting attitude. "What do you care if I care?" Quinn challenges a British journalist (Bruce Greenwood), who makes the mistake of taking the singer's songs literally.

The private Dylan is addressed in the tale of Robbie (Heath Ledger, who died recently), a movie actor who becomes famous after he stars in the biopic of a popular folk singer in the late '60s. Celebrity puts pressure on his marriage to a French painter played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, the only actor in the movie whom Haynes envisioned when he was writing it.

"She represents Suze Rotolo and Sara Dylan--the two defining romantic influences on the first half of Dylan's life," says Haynes. "To me, Charlotte has an integrity, a mystery. She materializes the characteristics that recurred in the women Dylan was attracted to. They had to stand outside the craziness to maintain his interest."

Haynes said he has never met the man, "but he saw the original concept and approved it. The details of the production weren't things he cared to be involved in." Dylan has received many requests for permission to make biopics of his life but passed on all of them. Biography was not Haynes' intention, and it was his freewheeling approach to the life that he believes appealed to the singer.

"But I wasn't inventing anything or imposing something on his story," Haynes said. "I was just trying to get at something core about him as a person."(IHT/Asahi: March 28,2008)