Ben Whish in "I'm Not There"

Visiting Buffalo last week as part of the Babel series, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk had this to say about the telling of one’s life story, as he had done himself in his recent book, Istanbul: “Autobiography is not about remembering, it is about forgetting.”

We choose the details of the life that we present. The ones chosen become the story, the mythic elements; those not chosen are forgotten. “I could write the book again and choose entirely different things to say about myself, and each time write an entirely different book,” Pamuk said. “Ten different books.”

In I’m Not There, the brilliant new film written and directed by Todd Haynes, the subject “Bob Dylan” is broken up into six different identities. One of these is an 11-year-old black boy, Woody, played by Marcus Carl Franklin; another is the nicotine-waif Dylan character of the early electric period, Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett). The film never misses a trick—Jude echoes “Judas,” which Dylan was famously called by a fan in the confused days after the one-time folkie went electric; “Woody” rides the rails and carries a guitar whose case, like Guthrie’s, reads “This Machine Kills Fascists.” But the film’s true brilliance is in its suggestion that it is not just Dylan who is a compilation of myths and signs. All our identities are constructed as backward-glancing stories, and, in fundamental ways, we truly are different people at different stages of our lives.

Of course, for radical self-reinvention, very few top Bob Dylan. As I’m Not There unfolds, one is surprised how many Dylan stories there are that one already knows, as if he’s a modern-day trickster character of mutating plotlines, Coyote for baby-boomers. Dylan had a motorcycle accident, was called Judas for playing electric, sang protest songs against racism and the war, looked like an early 1970s fro-wearing rockstar for a while, then a too-much-eyeliner tired rockstar a short time later. There’s Dylan and Joan Baez, Dylan holing up with the Band in what looked like an acid-trip carnival town but which they called a Basement. Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, Dylan with lots of mod teenyboppers like on Freewheeling, Dylan the Okie and the folkie. Dylan in the Village, Dylan turning on the Beatles, Dylan born again through Jesus. I’m Not There misses none of these episodes—it is the Dylan-head film of all Dylan-head films.

But I’m Not There is also always ready to stand these myths on their heads, to rework them into recognizable but fundamentally new fictive constructions. Notably, one of the six Dylan characters is not a musician but an actor who comes to prominence by playing another of the Dylans in a film bio within the film. The troubadour sincerity of rebel-folkie “Jack Rollins” (Christian Bale) becomes a star vehicle for the considerably more compromised “Robbie Clark” (Heath Ledger). One cannot have a triumph of authentic imagination and expression, the film suggests, without then facing pressures from every direction to engage in inauthentic self-imitations. Dylan’s shape-shifting results not only from his relentless desire as a 20th-century artist to “make it new,” but from the self-loathing (and other-loathing) that results from playing yourself, as it were, in a movie.

Of course, I’m Not There’s most outlandish reimaginings of Dylan myths are those that make his manifestations African-American and a woman. These are each different kinds of shape-shiftings in the film. Dylan as black kid Woody references the Civil Rights struggle, and Dylan’s role in famously articulating its basic premises in poetry: “How many roads must a man walk down/Before you can call him a man…” This is Dylan-as-other, and there is less attempt to re-make Marcus Carl Franklin as a Dylan look-alike than we see in any of the other manifestations. Two categories, white and black, are always at play here, whether white plays black or black plays white. With Jude, on the other hand, we see a melting of difference, as Cate Blanchett stunningly adopts Dylan’s accent, mannerisms, even a very convincing, goofy walk, most striking in a scene where Jude seeks after fleeing socialite Coco Rivington through a dreamy patch of woods.

In the Blanchett scenes, we are most reminded that Haynes’s other films have consistently reflected gay themes; now Haynes gives us a “queering” of the otherwise relentlessly heterosexual Dylan, whose long-time fan-base has always been disproportionately male and straight. But if identity is slippery and ever-shifting, I’m Not There suggests, is not gender also at play? And more strikingly, given the audacity of the conceit of a female actor playing a male role in a film biography, there are times we even forget this gender substitution, so convincingly does Blanchett pick up Dylan’s mannerisms from the mid-1960s Don’t Look Back period. S/he perfectly embodies the mixture of frustration, flippancy, agitation and whining of Dylan at this moment when he was at the height of both his genius as a songwriter and as a sarcastic little prick. “This is Brian Jones,” Jude fawns at one point during a party, before letting fall the hammer, “of that really groovy cover band.” Even in the midst of its theoretical gambits and plot palimpsests, I’m Not There always delivers to Dylan fans, who want to be the only ones in the theater getting an inside joke.

Though we would expect the Blanchett scenes to be the film’s biggest stretch, it’s Richard Gere’s embodiment of the reclusive late Dylan that prove the most disappointing. To my mind, Gere has always been a wooden actor, and in this otherwise very supple cast, highlighted by Blanchett and Ledger, he sticks out. In terms of the work his character must do, summing up and bookending the story, perhaps the role itself is bound to disappoint. Perhaps this is where life picks up the thread of the story, because there is yet another Dylan that doesn’t appear in the film—the croaking country fair metaphysician of recent years, decked in the threads of a honky-tonk dandy and backed by bands with ferocious musicianship.

In the end, I’m Not There throws a whole lotta words and representations out there but doesn’t seek the final word on Dylan. In the final frame, we see grainy footage of the singer himself as he noodles off in a harmonica improvisation. We recall the first frames of the film having Dylan as the first-person camera, the subject looking out, as if we too embody this identity that morphs again and again over the course of a lifetime. The final frames remind us that, after all, there’s only one Dylan. There are different stories of a life, says I’m Not There. All of them are true.

Look for our interview with I’m Not There director Todd Haynes in next week’s issue.