i'm not there (todd haynes, 2007)

This is the twentieth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 20 is called "Different Strokes Week":

The biopic is a more-or-less tried-and-true staple of the movies. The desire to tell the story of intriguing, remarkable, or talented people is understandable. Yet, often, the creativity or uniqueness of these subjects is lazily stretched over the unimaginative framework of The Standard Biopic: birth, struggle, success, downfall, redemption, and death. But extraordinary skill and intriguing lives deserve more than a paint-by-numbers approach. After all, these are people who, for one reason or another, stand out from the crowd, and drafting their stories with a humdrum blueprint is almost insulting. Luckily, not every biopic is so generic.

This week's challenge is to watch a film found on Darren Carver-Balsiger's Unconventional Biopics list. Like most things, some work better than others, but at least the filmmakers thought it worthwhile to honor their chosen subject's real-life story with a deservedly uncommon approach, and that, at least, is worth a couple of hours of our attention.

Now this is my kind of category: a biopic that trashes the idea of biopics. Todd Haynes doesn't make it all up, but he does make it unimportant whether this or that scene "really happened". He doesn't think you explain Bob Dylan that way ... well, I doubt he thinks you can explain Bob Dylan, but you can sniff around the edges, get a deeper feel for the artist than you might have before you saw the film. If there's a flaw in I'm Not There (and I don't know if it should even qualify as a flaw), it's that I imagine it's unintelligible to people who aren't fairly involved in thinking about the Legend of Dylan. The film references many famous moments, but it doesn't often put them into any specific context, and the movie is useless if you are looking for a Wikipedia-style summary of Dylan's career. No, Haynes evokes some of the feelings Dylan inhabits in our collective imagination.

To take the most obvious starting point, there is no character named "Bob Dylan" in this biopic of Bob Dylan. Instead, six very different actors portray Dylan-type characters that roughly correspond to various moments in Dylan's life and career. It's not all that helpful to list them, but here goes. There's Ben Whishaw as "Arthur Rimbaud", a poetically-minded teenager; Marcus Carl Franklin as "Woody Guthrie", an 11-year-old black kid who carries a guitar with a case that reads "this machine kills fascists"; Christian Bale as "Jack Rollins", a folk singer with a career reminiscent of early Dylan; Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark", an actor who plays Jack Rollins in a biopic; Richard Gere as "Billy the Kid"; and best of all, Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn", who is clearly modeled on the Dylan that went electric. Does it "make sense"? I doubt it, if you don't already have this stuff in your head. But if Dylan's career is part of your own history, then I'm Not There is magical, delightfully so.

And this is best exemplified by Blanchett's performance. She was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar, and all of her fellow nominees are excellent actors, including eventual winner Tilda Swinton, and it's not like the Academy ignores Blanchett, who already had a Supporting Actress Oscar at the time and who later won a Best Actress award as well, but geez. I don't know that there is a better portrayal of Bob Dylan on film than Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn". She is remarkable.

So yes, I think the audience for this movie is fairly narrow. But within those confines, it hits the spot. It exposes A Complete Unknown for the merely good movie it is. #352 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.