I’m Not There

Boasting an eclectic, talented cast (Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a well-respected director (Todd Haynes, whose last feature film was 2002’s excellent Far From Heaven), I’m Not There is probably the film event of the year. It’s also tedious and self-indulgent, an affliction that seems, depressingly, a symptom of its ambition. Using six different actors to depict the life—or rather the shifting pop persona—of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There is in fact guilty of the same extravagances and machinations as Dylan himself (unsurprisingly, the film has received the musician’s imprimatur). Narcissistic fandom is the name of the game: Haynes drops biographical in-jokes that serve no purpose other than to inflate his cred as a Dylanite (and to flatter you, if you know them); hipster musicians (Stephen Malkmus, My Morning Jacket) contribute covers of the coolest Dylan songs (lots of stuff from The Basement Tapes); famous friends drop by for a sequence parodying Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (in which Julianne Moore actually manages to out-smug Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). The film’s main threads are, thus, hardly designed to inform or analyze. Gere’s thread in particular is drawn out to insufferable length, saying nothing at all about the Dylan-as-Billy-the-Kid era it pretends to intuit so well. Blanchett’s Dylan—the rakish Orlando of the 1965 British concert tour—is admittedly impressive, so much so that one wishes the whole film were about him/her. But even Blanchett can’t compete with Haynes’ sycophantic mythmaking—a jarring contrast, by the way, to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back, on which the Blanchett sequences are based. Pennebaker’s Dylan is still an impish god, but he is asinine, misogynist, pretentious and incoherent to boot. Pennebaker uses his own art to tackle Dylan’s foibles; Haynes confuses them for artistic revelation. WAIT FOR THE DVD

I’m Not There is now playing at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland St).