I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

It should have been an offer moviegoers couldn't refuse: the first officially approved biopic of Bob Dylan. That was how casual fans greeted the announcement of Todd Haynes' 2007 film I'm Not There. Of course, there were early reports that Haynes had chosen to cast a variety of performers to play Dylan at different points in his life, and those reports did usually include the fact that these performers ran a demographic spectrum of age, race, and gender. Sure, both an unknown young Black boy and a beloved Australian actress would portray Dylan, but how alienating could this movie really be? Of course, as anyone who's had the privilege of watching I'm Not There is certainly aware, Haynes didn't so much tell Dylan's story as shatter it and reset the pieces in a kaleidoscopic arrangement guided more by tone and mood than traditional coherence. Rather than the awards-friendly life story so many artists receive, this ballad of Bob Dylan is legible only to those exceptionally well versed in his life and times, and even then, it takes considerable leaps of interpretive faith to bring everything into balance (sure, Richard Gere might be good casting for a Bob Dylan type, but each viewer will have to follow their own path to justifying his role as an aging outlaw living in a dustbowl village that seems to exist outside of time). I'm Not There was a box office bomb, recouping only half its budget of $20 million, while in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane savaged the film by claiming “it makes Yellow Submarine look like a miracle of sober narrative.” And yet for all its flights of surreal fancy, I'm Not There is actually a remarkably insightful telling of Dylan's life story—it just so happens to be one that's told from behind his own eyes, a biography that rides a wave of dream logic to dive deeper than any traditional telling of the '60s and their cultural-emotional aftermath could hope to do. One key to unlocking the story's rationale is to track when each new character (none of whom happen to be named Bob Dylan) emerges, and consider what that emergence says about the character whose perspective directly precedes it. When Woody, the little Black boy who represents Dylan's early days as a folk traditionalist, is told to sing about his own time, we suddenly meet Jack, a singer of fiery protest songs—a new “Bob” has been spawned in order to serve a necessary role in the development of Dylan's persona. And when fame becomes overwhelming, Jude (the mid-1960s Bob most clearly recognizable from cultural iconography, who's incidentally portrayed by Cate Blanchett) stumbles down a hallway and through a door only for Billy (the aforementioned outlaw implied to quite literally be an elder Billy the Kid who dodged a bullet and escaped into the hills) to step through his own door on the other side of a cut. I'm Not There has gained a strong reputation among cinephiles in the nearly two decades since its ignominious release, and I hope my book might serve some role in exposing its freewheelin' brilliance—not just intellectually but emotionally, as its odd curlicuing story leads to a place of cumulative power by the time the credits roll—to an audience who might not otherwise have been inclined to seek it out.