Opens Wednesday, November 21

I'm Not There (Grade C)

Until now gay Portland filmmaker Todd Haynes has batted a thousand with beautifully stylized and controversial films like Poison, Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven. The Village Voice named his masterpiece Safe the best film of the 1990s.
But his latest project hits a brick wall, and that wall’s name is Bob Dylan. I’m Not There – an adamantly unconventional biopic about the legendary troubadour – boasts good acting, stunning cinematography and a few other jewels that we’ve come to expect from Haynes. But it’s really pretentious, it rambles and it ultimately alienates any viewer who doesn’t subscribe to the belief that Dylan is an unfathomably complex mythical figure.
Before the cameras rolled I’m Not There generated monster buzz as a result of an audacious casting maneuver. Like Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, Haynes uses multiple actors to portray various aspects of Dylan’s identity. For the most part he avoids a chronological narrative by crosscutting between the different story lines.
Child actor Marcus Carl Franklin gets the ball rolling as “Woody,” an itinerant black boy who – like Dylan – is highly influenced by Woody Guthrie. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw and Cate Blanchett play the singer/songwriter at various points in the 1960s, while a scruffy Richard Gere rides around on a horse in a tedious segment that pays homage to Dylan’s fascination with Billy the Kid.
All the performances are solid, but Blanchett is the most intriguing of the bunch. This is not simply because it’s a novelty to see her in drag. In fact, she captures Dylan’s nervous mannerisms so perfectly that you instantly forget he’s a she. Blanchett won Best Actress honors at the Venice Film Festival for the role, and she’s already a front runner for an Oscar.
Unfortunately Blanchett and her costars can’t make up for the unengaging storytelling, or the off-putting feeling that you’d have to study every scrap of Dylan esoterica and memorize all his lyrics to really “get” the movie.
The tone of the movie shifts so much that it becomes hard to tell when Haynes is joking and when he’s deadly serious. In interview footage Julianne Moore plays a character based on Joan Baez. The phony folk concert photos that accompany her recollections look like they’re straight out of a Christopher Guest send-up. I enjoyed the comic relief, but the lack of laughter from fellow viewers me wonder if this was supposed to be a joke or a yet another reverent bow at the Dylan altar.