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Clarence Tsui

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale,  Heath Ledger, Richard Gere
Director: Todd Haynes
Category: IIB
In  I'm Not There,  the Bob Dylan-inspired    chain-smoking poet, Arthur Rimbaud  (Ben Whishaw),    talks about his 'simple rules of going into hiding'.
'Never create anything,' he says. 'It will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you, for the rest of your life.'
That's probably how director Todd Haynes   imagines Dylan would react to  the layers of meaning    attributed  to his work.
Instead of  a straightforward biopic, Haynes  breaks the American singer-songwriter's life into six  parts and develops each one  into a  fictional persona.
Apart from Whishaw's Arthur - whose  role is mostly delivered   from behind a table - there's also Woody  (Marcus Carl Franklin),   a singing 11-year-old drifter with nothing to his name but a guitar marked with the phrase 'This machine kills fascists'.
And there's Jack Rollins  (Christian Bale),  a protest-song troubadour from the early 1960s who  reinvents himself a decade later as an evangelist.  There's also Robbie  (Heath Ledger),   a 1970s actor famous for playing Jack in a biopic, and who - like Dylan during  the same period - is entrenched in a  dysfunctional marriage.
Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid,   a nod  to Dylan's role (both as an actor and songwriter)  in Sam Peckinpah's  western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and seen revisiting episodes   of his former selves. He  eventually ends up in a face-off with a very old Pat Garrett  (Bruce Greenwood).
Finally, in black-and-white segments,  reminiscent of Dylan's documentary Don't Look Back, Haynes unleashes Jude  (Cate Blanchett, above),  an explicit impersonation of 1960s Dylan -  seen infuriating  fans with  her electric-guitar sets and  bickering with  a lover  in the form of the Edie Sedgwick-clone  Coco  (Michelle Williams).
With such a wide array of material  - and having cast the chronology of events to the wind   - I'm Not There runs the risk of becoming  caught up in its own importance. However, in  the hands of Haynes,  the film is at once visually inventive and emotionally engaging with a wealth of  references to Dylan's  life  that question the mythology    generated during his  career.
Haynes has certainly not heeded Arthur/Dylan's views about the albatross  born  of artistic creation but I'm Not There is  nothing to be ashamed of  either for  Dylan,  or Haynes.
I'm Not There opens today



I'm Not There