London,

I'm Not There

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Todd Haynes. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw

 

Description: Impressionistic biopic of music icon and rabble rouser Bob Dylan, casting six actors to play different aspects of the singer and his work. This ponderous meditation on one man's roller-coaster life moves from the early days, when Dylan fell in love with folk music and became fascinated with Woody Guthrie, to his tumultuous years as an inconstant lover, the period when he became obsessed with Rimbaud, to the physically draining 1966 tour of England, when Dylan swats away the media and dodges barbs from old flame, model Coco Rivington.

Country: US. 2007. 135mins

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Bob's not there, but Cate is ...

 

Ghost of electricity: Cate Blanchett plays Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour of Britain, when he abandoned his acoustic guitar

Amazing: Blanchett's performance is a superb piece of impersonation and acting

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• Interview: Todd Haynes

No, he is not there. At least, not until the end credits do we see the real Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's remarkable kaleidoscope dedicated to the life, times and constantly changing nature of the singer. Before that, six actors portray him, and one of them, Cate Blanchett, will almost certainly get an Oscar nomination for her attempt.

One would say it is her film but for the fact that it is controlled by a director who has already demonstrated that he is one of America's most risk-taking and imaginative film-makers. Most impressive was his little-seen Safe, which ought to be revived now as a lesson on the effect of the environment on humanity, and Far from Heaven, which was more appreciated as a reworking of Douglas Sirk for contemporary times.

Those movies, though, may have prepared Haynes for this part-factual and part-invented summation of Dylan, in which no one is actually called Dylan by name but each sums up an aspect of his chameleon-like career as the great escape artist, or possibly artful dodger, of the music scene.

Blanchett is the Dylan at which someone shouted "Judas" during the 1966 UK tour when he deserted his role as folk-poet and went electric, unable to handle his own legend and wanting to change it. And she shows both his vulnerability and fury as the hero worship ceased and his enemies proliferated, worrying him into making statements about his art that couldn't be defined, especially to aggressively doubtful BBC reporters. Amazingly, she looks the spitting image of the man and manages his whiney, nasal voice to perfection.

None of the other representations of him even try for that, or are asked to. This is a superb impersonation but a great piece of acting too, never advertising its brilliance but achieving something like the truth, all the same, through what seems like sheer magic.

Young Marcus Carl Franklin is the black boy apeing Woody Guthrie and travelling through the South in openfronted boxcars. Christian Bale encompasses the early years of heroic radicalism and also the period when Dylan got God and made lousy albums as a consequence.

Then there is Heath Ledger as the failed lover, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as an image of Joan Baez and, perhaps, an amalgam of all his palely hurt and wounded women. British actor Ben Whishaw is Dylan the Rimbaud-obsessed cod philosopher, and in what is the least satisfactory episode, Richard Gere references Dylan's presence in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

The acting, all of which is good regardless, is matched by film-making that changes with the style of each period. Dylan's brief cavorting with the Beatles is seen as if Richard Lester were in charge of the proceedings and there are many other bows to the film-makers of the Sixties and Seventies. It's a tribute to his skill that this is done without the feeling that Haynes is being overly clever.

It can, one must admit, become restless and baffling at times, especially for those who come to I'm Not There without much foreknowledge of its strange subject. But most of the time the film makes more than adequate sense and captures the essence of the man, like a version of Elgar's Enigma Variations summing up not the composer's friends but a single person.

The fact that Dylan approved, at least of the idea of the movie, and so allowed his music to flow through it unhindered doesn't make it good, but it surely helps. At least the man himself allowed Haynes to define him, not mercilessly but with a shrewdness laced with ironic humour. And if the whole makes a determinedly fractured and unorthodox narrative, Haynes can easily say that it is a portrait of a fractured man - an enigma who doesn't want to be defined by his fans, or even himself.

It's a crazy film which shouldn't work, but for most of the time does.

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