It's been a year in which as a rock fan, you might have been better off down the flicks than standing smoke-free at a gig or knee-deep in mud at a festival. After all the fuss about Control (and I know this is terrible, but I'm not a Joy Division fan and I get the feeling I know how this film ends, so I've not actually seen it yet), there's an even bigger fuss brewing about the Todd Haynes film 'inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan'. Which OMM has now clocked...
As a Bob fan, with a particular interest in the bootlegged work, the prospect of I'm Not There, which takes its name from a still as-yet unreleased Basement Tapes track, was always thrilling. But even I'm not going to say this is one for all the family and bring the popcorn. In a recent piece in the New York Times, Cate Blanchett said 'I don't think the film even strives to make sense, in a way,' and she's right. She of course is one of six actors in the role of 'Dylan'. Their separate stories - some bearing close relationship to Bob's story as we know it in the history book, others not - are intertwined in what at least on first viewing appears to be haphazard fashion. It's actually those most mysterious passages, which have emerged from Haynes' imagination, which I liked best: Marcus Carl Franklin, a black child, as 'Dylan' (although the character is actually called Woody Guthrie), as a hobo; Richard Gere, a usually quite offensive figure, as 'Dylan' (aka Billy the Kid), as an 'old weird America'-era man on the run. It's these scenes which feel most authentically Dylanesque - as if they might in fact have leaked out of Bob's imagination or his dreams. Anyhooo... Lots of people really won't like the film, even real obsessives, who'll still get a kick from walk-on characters like 'Delia' in those Gere scenes. (A colleague at the same sneak preview wondered whether most punters wouldn't just prefer a more irreverent version of the Scorsese documentaries). But the Haynes film is brilliantly conceived and it often looks ravishing (with the director switching styles throughout, paying homage to Pennebaker- or is it Fellini? - Peckinpah and more); and guess what, the music's pretty good, too. For my money, he might have set himself a nigh-on impossible task, but unlike pretty much every other rock biopic, this is a film which opens up possibilities, rather than reduce its protagonist to dumb caricature. It'll be fascinating to learn what non-fans make of it, as well as people like me who like to waste time arguing that 'I'm Not There', the song, is in fact vastly overrated...
