THERE OR NOT?
Bob Dylan played by a 14 year old Afro-America? Bob Dylan played by Cate Blanchett? Strange, but true. This is Todd Haynes’ brave and inventive new Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, which opened in cinemas last week. Skimming through mostly favourable reviews beforehand, I was expecting confusion. This is a film without a coherent narrative structure in which Dylan’s life is divided up into different periods played by different actors, which are then pieced together as a seemingly incoherent whole. Oh, and neither act goes by the actual name of Bob Dylan. The brilliant Marcus Carl Franklin plays “Woody Guthrie” (a homage to one of Dylan’s great heroes), the ebullient young singer with star-studded ambition; then there is Christian Bale playing Jack Rollins (who later morphs into the devout Pastor John), the early folk singing Dylan; then comes Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, a renowned actor created to show Dylan’s struggles with fame and, loosely, his relationship with his wife (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg); then, in the most remarkable performance of them all, we are introduced to Blanchett’s Dylan, the drug-riddled and defiant little brat who is forever at war with the press; then it’s Richard Gere, who we’ll come to later; and throughout all this, the last of the Dylans, Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud, acts as a narrator of sorts and appears at various points throughout the film.
Initially I saw it as a kind of hallucinatory melange, an indistinct patchwork of beautiful pieces, each of them brilliant in their own right, but which, assembled together as a two hour biopic, I couldn’t understand entirely - much like the mysterious Dylan himself. You think you know him, you think you have a handle on one of his many sides, but then another comes along and throws you off the scent. This is particularly true of Richard Gere as Billy the Kid: he turns up as the final Dylan in the jigsaw and totally confounds what you think you’ve figured out as, confused as we are, he walks through his fantastical, Tim Burton-esque country retreat.
Dylan’s life can be split, like the film, into various parts. He reinvented himself a number of times, both musically and in appearance. You could almost say they were clearly defined periods of his career. And they are in the film, too. Just when you thought you might predict what Dylan would do next, he would do the opposite. Just ask those fans that turned up to Newport ’65 expecting to see folk Dylan, only to find electric Dylan. This moment is brilliantly and amusingly imagined in the film with Blanchett and her band gunning down the folk fans with an impressive array of tommy guns. Reinvention is a consistent thread in Haynes’ film, too. But while we can understand each stage on its own, assembled together the man on the inside becomes no more clear than when the movie started. All we know is what we knew already - that Dylan was strange, unpredictable and difficult, but no less fascinating for it. Elusive in life, elusive on film.
But perhaps the narrative is not as loose as others have said it is, or at least as loose as it first appears after watching. It seems to me that, in this film, we glimpse through each of the characters stages of his life that aren’t as incoherent as they first seem; you might almost call it a journey that takes us progressively and unknowingly closer and closer to the real Bob Dylan. There is the initial youthful intent to be famous (Franlkin); his coming of age period featuring his heartfelt folk songs delivered with acoustic panache (Bale); a period of confusion and, perhaps, inner frustration with fame (Ledger); his realisation that a song can’t change a thing and his subsequent stubbornness (Blanchett); and the sadder realisation that, even in the most rural retreat imaginable, away from the glare of the spotlight and press, there is no escaping the inherent ills of modern society. It’s as if what comes across as brashness in the Blanchett scenes - the arrogant denial of the press and his turning his back on folk traditions and its fans - is in fact vindicated by Gere’s experiences as Billy the Kid. After all, if he can’t prevent the construction of a motorway through his remote rural village in person, standing in front of the governor, what hope did he ever have of changing the world with a song? Perhaps this was not the intention - who knows - but Haynes himself has said that Gere’s Dylan most closely resembles the real Dylan, although perhaps not the one we, the public, know best: not the Blood On The Tracks era Dylan, but the quiet and family-oriented Dylan who constantly tours the U.S. and hosts a popular music radio show on satellite radio. This is the life he eventually chose, not one of the ‘mini-lives’ played out to us in I’m Not There, the lives for which he is undoubtedly more famous. Haynes himself agrees:
"I would argue that there are more albums associated with Dylan's interest in roots music, country music, American folklore and, basically, the history of the American popular song than there are albums that reflect the urban, political, '60s-era period that made him famous. It's just an essential and inescapable aspect of his imagination and creative life and sustenance."
For me, then, aside from the sheer richness of the content, the audacity of the idea, and the quality of the cinematography, the peculiarity and brilliance of this film is that where it becomes most confusing and seemingly unreal, with Gere and Billy the Kid, it in fact becomes more real than ever. And so we leave thinking we don’t know Dylan any more than we did - and yet, deep down, perhaps we do.
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This is a very tight argument and I appreciate reading it.
However, although I can understand why you see Dylan as an America phenomena, one who constantly tours the US, as you say. He is also an international figure, and constantly tours in the UK and the rest of Europe as well.
There is, of course, many traceable American influences in his music, mainly the blues. But, similarly, there are also traces of other, European cultures, in his musical background.
My own view of the film is available on my blog:
http://johnbakersblog.co.uk