breakfast euphemisms

For a film that has been so heavily advertised as ‘Bob Dylan as played by several actors’, I’m Not There is surprisingly not about Bob Dylan’s life. Well, not precisely anyway. The trailer shows Cate Blanchett in pseudo drag (more about that later) for Dylan’s infamous ‘going electric stage’ of his Bringing It All Back Home album but once we’re in the film we discover it’s not Bob Dylan after all, but Jude Quinn, a fictional character based on Dylan. That disillusion sums up the premise of this film. It allows for the poetic license that groups African American child actor Marcus Carl Franklin and Richard Gere as incarnations of the great folk artist. The truth is they are not Bob Dylan. They approximate him. We are incensed to him through them. His spirit lives inthem.

Character wise, it can be a little confusing. The other characters show aspects of his life. What is strange is that writer/director Todd Haynes has taken real people and applied the same poetic license that the ‘Bob Dylan played by several actors’ tagline would have required. Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw (of Perfume fame, who looks surprisingly like a mixture of Dylan and Jeff Buckley, an actual 19th century poet) appears in black and white cut scenes to deliver phrases mainly about the kinetic energy of poetry. Woody Guthrie (who, despite being white in real life, is played by an African American) waxes lyrically in the way that a 60 year old blues singer would, only he’s eleven. It’s a little jarring it first and I got the distinct opinion that his character was written for an older man and then substituted for effect. He didn’t sound quite like a wise 11 year old, but more like a 60 year old trapped. And finally, Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) whose story doesn’t really seem to fit in any clear way. All quite well known figures in history.

Onto these, he tacks on fictional characters Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) to show Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity, Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) to show a more dramatic and somewhat arrogant side, and Jude Quinn (Blanchett)as the charismatic glue that holds the allusions together. The characters are not meant to be Bob Dylan and this gives the Haynes license to create scenes from scratch because he is not under the ‘biography’ umbrella. However, the choice to use real characters alongside fictional characters is a confusing one, especially when changing the real characters in fictional ways (Arthur Rimbaud to look like Dylan and an ethnicity switch for Woody Guthrie).

The star of the film is undeniably Cate Blanchett, and this could be due to the fact that her character Jude Quinn is the most like Bob Dylan out of the whole cast. The name Jude was obviously chosen to be unisex, implying that Blanchett is playing the role of a man. She even, reportedly, wore a sock down her pants so she could ‘walk like a man’. However, there is one scene where a woman refers to Jude as ‘she’ so the ambiguity is sustained. The scene plays on to find Jude retorting to the woman with very masculine sexual innuendo. She hangs out with Ginsberg and the Beatles, she smokes 60 cigarettes a day, she finds truth in her songs but doesn’t feel the need to explain them. She is sly and vague in interviews. She is the obviously the closest thing this film comes to portraying Bob Dylan and she does it well.

Rating: 7/10
The Wrap-up: This is a must see film for Dylan fans of any calibre, it is an interesting way to look at the life of Bob Dylan, but don’t expect a biography film or you’ll be left a little in the dark. The film is a little abstract and is quite disjointed due to its ambition at trying to cover so many different characters at once.

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