I'm Not There

Yes ’n’ how many actors does it take to play Bob?/ The former Robert Zimmerman?/The answer, my friend, is a mind-blowin’ six – at least in I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s radical, much-anticipated Dylan biopic. The sextet includes the miraculous Cate Blanchett, who’s female (and received an Oscar nomination), Marcus Carl Franklin, who’s African-American and a child, and the likes of Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, and Ben Whishaw. Not one of them actually plays anyone named Dylan, or even Zimmerman; instead, all are employed, in Haynes’s kaleidoscopic, cubist, out-on-a-limb film, to embody various iconic personas in the history and hagiography of His Bobness. Roger Ebert has cited François Girard’s 1993 Canadian masterwork 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould as a precedent for the fragmentized aesthetic strategy Haynes employs here, a dizzying, dazzling multiplicity of forms, film styles, and cultural references. If nothing else — and there is plenty else, and Dylanologists will be debating it for years to come — this inspired, maddening, free-wheelin’ work gives mercurial genius Dylan the uncommon movie treatment he indisputably merits. “A profoundly, movingly personal film, passionate in its engagement with the mysteries of the recent past . . . Haynes hurls a Molotov cocktail through the façade of the Hollywood biopic factory” (A.O. Scott, New York Times). Colour, 35mm, in English. 135 mins.