By Tom Breihan, Monday, Nov. 26 2007 @ 6:36PM

Bad popcorn
The title to this post is totally, utterly misleading because I didn't learn anything watching I'm Not There: not about Bob Dylan, not about myself, not about the Dylan myth. In fact, the act of watching the movie felt almost like an afterthought. You probably know all the relevant facts about the movie already: rather than making anything resembling a straight biopic, Todd Haynes split the multitudinous Dylan myth into six component parts, turned each of those parts into a separate character, and went on a stunt-casting binge to find the right actors for those characters: Cate Blanchett plays the mid-60s Don't Look Back press-hating trickster version of Dylan, for instance, and a little black kid named Marcus Carl Franklin plays the rootless fabulist Dylan who fixated so hard on Woody Guthrie that he tried to become the guy. All those different Dylans have their own names, and no one in the movie ever utters the phrase "Bob Dylan." Haynes has done this sort of free-associative film-essay on his musical heroes before, but even Velvet Goldmine, which I loved, is as linear as a Mentos commercial compared to I'm Not There. Haynes could've just as well invented three or ten or 136 separate Dylans, and the effect would've been basically the same. He releases his various free-floating Dylans into a miasmic anti-narrative, and it never becomes entirely clear whether all these various Dylans occupy the same world. The Heath Ledger Dylan is an actor who portrays the Christian Bale Dylan, for instance, and the Marcus Carl Franklin Dylan turns up in what I guess was a dream of the Heath Ledger Dylan's wife. "Mystery is a traditional fact," the Cate Blanchett Dylan argues near the end of the movie, and the movie takes him on his word. Haynes never tries to pin Dylan down the way biopics generally do; instead, he celebrates Dylan's elusiveness by making a deeply elusive movie. The problem is that I'm Not There is so elusive that it's barely a movie; instead, it's a collection of riffs, and 135 minutes of cinematic riffs is too much.
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