Directed by Todd Haynes, one of whose early films told the tragic tale of Karen Carpenter using glove puppets, I’m Not There is the first cinematic attempt to tackle the epic landscape that is Dylan’s life and work. It is a wildly experimental film whose extravagantly staged, but often determinedly confusing, approach is as far away from the tired terrain of the traditional biopic as it is possible to go. Perhaps it is for this very reason that it initially received Dylan’s blessing back when it was only a one-page treatment. Dylan’s son, Jesse, has now been sent a DVD copy of I’m Not There, which has been passed on to the great man. Thus far, Haynes has heard nothing back. Given Dylan’s famed reticence, we may never get to know what he thinks of a film that plays havoc with the very idea of Bob Dylan.The director is a mercurial talent whose previous films have included Velvet Goldmine, which was set in the glam rock era, and Far From Heaven, a homage to the great Hollywood melodramatist Douglas Sirk. Nothing he has done previously, though, quite prepares you for this roller coaster ride.It begins brilliantly and provocatively with that now legendary motorcycle crash in 1966, the metaphorical death that allowed the late Sixties, surrealist, strung-out Dylan the downtime he needed to be born again as a family man, recluse and rabbinical storyteller. In I’m Not There, though, Dylan actually dies in the crash.’I thought that was kind of neat’, says Haynes, an affable, animated 46-year-old American in check shirt, faded black jeans and sneakers, ‘because the crash was a death of sorts. The counterculture was actually mourning Dylan at the time, even more so when he was reborn as a rootsy country singer. So, in a way, it’s a really good place to start a movie that deals with the idea of artistic reinvention and that, for the most part, combines fact and fiction pretty openly.’In I’m Not There, there are seven different Dylans, or, as Haynes puts it, ’seven core characters each representing a pivotal time in Dylan’s life and work’. There’s the young Dylan who wanted to be Woody Guthrie, the slightly older Dylan who almost became Pete Seeger, and the slightly stoned Dylan who summoned up the ghost of Rimbaud. The film really becomes - there’s no other word for it - Dylanesque, when the wild mercury Dylan shows up, followed by the backwoods Basement Tapes Dylan, the Blood on the Tracks Dylan and the born-again, Bible-thumping Dylan.The seven narratives - and I use the word in its loosest sense - unfold in a kaleidoscopic way that, according to the director, echoes Dylan’s urge to ‘constantly multiply the confusions and toy with the desire that people have to try and pin him down’.To multiply the confusions even more, Haynes has cast six actors to portray the seven Dylans, one of whom, Christian Bale, plays both Dylan the folk prophet and Dylan the God botherer. It’s an inspired conceit, but, inevitably, some Bobs work better than others. The funniest Bob is a 13-year-old African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin), the most believable Bob is a woman (Cate Blanchett), and the most allegorical Bob is a Buddhist (Richard Gere). None of the seven is actually called Bob, mind. One is called Arthur, as in Arthur Rimbaud, another Billy, as in Billy the Kid, and yet another Jude, as in - I guess - Judas Iscariot. You get the picture? And even if you don’t, you can kind of see why the real Dylan went for it. I’m Not There may not quite be as out-there as his own skewed cinematic take on identity and performance, Renaldo and Clara, but it’s pretty damn close.’I wasn’t that interested in, you know, the truth,’ elaborates Haynes, sounding for a moment like his subject, ‘nor in taking the straight biopic approach. Instead, I wanted to track Dylan’s creative imagination and where it took him and how his life mirrored that imagination, or propelled it, or followed it. It’s essentially my take on those moments in Dylan’s development where his music and the events of his life intersected.’Thus Haynes gleefully explodes or exaggerates all the received wisdom about Dylan, allowing characters from songs to come to life and characters from real life to appear as hallucinations. The ghosts of Guthrie, Ginsberg, and Edie Sedgwick are summoned up, the old weird America of The Basement Tapes is recreated, and Pete Seeger finally gets to wield that infamous, but, alas, apocryphal, axe over the electric cables at Newport.Haynes’s wilful blurring of fact, fiction and myth will probably annoy the crap out of the Bob bores, the very people who possess the deep knowledge of Dylan lore to be able to pick up on, and decode, all the in-jokes and references.’Oh, they’ll be panicking, I suspect,’ grins Haynes, ‘but it’ll do them good. To me, it’s like the ultimate misunderstanding of Dylan to try and pin him down by collecting and endlessly analysing everything he does. The one thing you have to acknowledge about Dylan right off is that he’s never there when you reach out to claim him. He’s already gone, three steps down the road.’Does it worry him, though, that anyone with only a passing interest in Dylan’s music, or, indeed, no interest at all, may well be baffled by a film whose every scene assumes a certain level of prior knowledge on behalf of the viewer?’Oh, I really hope not,’ he says, looking pained at the very thought. ‘From the very start, when I conceived the idea of the multiple Dylans, I never thought that this was a film that would stand or fail on whether or not you got all the references. If it doesn’t have a visceral life of its own as a film, it doesn’t work. That’s been the really gratifying thing about the reaction so far.’ (The film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.) ‘It seems to be exciting people as a new way of looking at an artist’s life cinematically.’It certainly is that. Thus far, most reviewers have picked up on Blanchett’s performance as the strung-out, dandyfied, mid-Sixties’ Dylan, but it left me more irritated than inspired. She gets the walk, but not the talk. The tics and mannerisms are all in place, but the performance is too mannered, too actorly, to entirely convince.Nevertheless, in casting Blanchett, Haynes highlights something long overlooked, ignored, or not even noticed, by Dylan scholars: the sense of sexual indeterminacy that he adopted, and played around with, at that intensely creative time. The dandyism, the exaggerated drawl, the effete and extravagant stage gestures, the bitchy, spiteful tone of both ‘Positively 4th Street’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ - all suggest that Dylan may have borrowed more from the Warhol camp (ouch!) than he ever admitted, even as he was sneering at them in song. Let’s hear it, finally, for Queen Bob Approximately .’Oh absolutely,’ says Haynes. ‘Male, white heterosexuality has been imposed on Dylan in all these ways that have contributed to reducing the risks and the adventures that he was undertaking at the time. I mean, “Like a Rolling Stone” is all the things they say it is - the anthem, the roar of infinite possibility, of courage and hope - but it’s also a taunt, a big put-down. The tone of superiority is incredible. Almost queeny. The critics just don’t go there, though. They don’t explore the psychosexual thing, all those hard rock songs that are also feminine. Even with all the praise and worship, they box him in.’Todd Haynes, as you may have guessed, is not your regular Dylan fan. He has vague memories of ’singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Hebrew school as a toddler’, and discovered Blonde on Blonde at the same time as he was hanging out at hardcore punk gigs in Los Angeles in the late Seventies. It was much later, though, during a time of emotional and creative crisis, that he began delving deeply into the canon.’It was around the end of my thirties, when I was having a big personal and creative crisis. I had just finished making Velvet Goldmine, which had been so damn hard to get made, and I was feeling a bit lost, really. I suddenly looked around me and all my friends were having babies or had bought that little bit of real estate in New York. I had none of that in my life. All I had was my films. It was really the emotional fallout from that time that sent me running towards Dylan’s music.’His journey began when he bought The Columbia Bootleg Series Volume 1, and simultaneously began reading Greil Marcus’s book, Invisible Republic, which delves deep onto the musical and mystical roots of The Basement Tapes. ‘It was like I just suddenly couldn’t get enough of Bob Dylan,’ he says now, laughing.Having managed to find all five volumes of The Basement Tapes, which, unlike the official double album, includes the strange and startling song that gives his film its title, he then tracked down a copy of Eat the Document (DA Pennebaker’s unreleased tour documentary from 1966). Then, on a road trip from New York to Portland to begin writing his 2002 film, Far From Heaven, Haynes bought Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music box set. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘like all the pieces of this incredible jigsaw were coming together.’It was only when Haynes started delving into the transcripts of Dylan’s interviews and press conferences from the mid-Sixties, though, that the idea for the film began to really take shape.’I was just mesmerised reading this stuff,’ he enthuses, ‘I mean, this was improvised performance art at its highest. Dylan was just so ahead of the game back then, and moving at such a momentum. He was playing such extraordinary games with the media, answering their questions at all these other levels through the prism of his amazing imagination and humour and symbolic sensibility. I mean, the answers start to sound like his lyrics. Just incredible. I remember thinking, this has to be re-enacted, and brought to the light of day, and shared.’Unbelievably, Haynes began writing the script for I’m Not There convinced that the film would never get made. ‘I never thought for a moment I’d get the rights to the songs, but I kept returning to the script. The idea just kept pulling me back.’It was his producer, Christine Vachon, who contacted Jesse Dylan, Bob’s eldest son, and a film director himself. Jesse put her on to Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s business manager-cum-confidant, who instructed her to tell Haynes to send them a short outline of the idea as well as DVDs of all his films. In the summer of 2000, Haynes duly typed out a one-page treatment that began with the Rimbaud quote ‘I is another’, and laid out the notion of the multiple Dylans. A few months later, against all the odds, his film was given the green light by Dylan. ‘You just can’t second-guess him,’ laughs Haynes.Having watched I’m Not There, I’m inclined to say the same of Todd Haynes. Let’s just say his whole approach is a lot more referential than reverential, and not just towards Dylan. Stylistically, there are whole sections borrowed from Godard, Fellini and Peckinpah, with nods to Altman, Warhol and even Pennebaker thrown in for good measure.Sometimes, this magpie approach works brilliantly. The long scene where Blanchett’s strung-out Dylan stumbles through a party in Warhol’s studio is shot in the harsh, black and white style of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, creating yet another level of heightened unreality that reflects both Dylan’s unravelling psyche and the unreal amphetamine-fuelled atmosphere of the Factory.At other times, though, particularly in the long, allegorical section in which Dylan/Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) wanders through a backwoods landscape populated by strange characters from The Basement Tapes, you feel you are watching an entirely different film, one directed by the late Robert Altman at his most meandering and elliptical. It’s a story that goes nowhere, and, like much in the film, makes little sense as allegory unless you make all the connections - to The Basement Tapes album and the lost America it evokes; to Peckinpah’s film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, an ode to the disappearing west that Dylan soundtracked and in which he had a cameo; and to Dylan’s own sense of himself as a musical outlaw on the run from the critics and fans who endlessly try to pin him down or unmask him. When I mention my uneasiness with the Dylan/Billy section of the film, Haynes listens carefully and nods almost in agreement.’Well, it’s a leap, I guess,’ he says, after some thought, ‘and I know a lot of people would have preferred to just watch the Cate Blanchett Dylan the whole way through. But I thought it was important to have the sense of a man on the run in there, a man haunted by the ghosts of his previous selves, and by the fear that he might be somehow found out. There is often that fugitive sense to Dylan in both his music and his life, the urge to keep moving, to not look back, to shed one self in other to create another. That’s really what I was getting at.’For me, though, the bravura set pieces worked better than the tangled allegorical sections. The notorious battle of Newport, 1965, begins with Dylan and cohorts rolling into the festival site like hired hitmen in a fleet of limos with darkened windows, and culminates with them raking the booing audience with machine-gun fire. It’s a scene that echoes Sid Vicious’s performance of ‘My Way’ in The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle, which climaxes with the pantomime punk rocker slaughtering his audience literally as well as metaphorically. Dylan as the godfather of punk, anyone?’Oh God, yeah,’ says Haynes. ‘I mean, Newport was pure punk. The volume, the distortion, the aggression. It was an assault on the audience. To me, that’s the birth of punk. Then, on the European tour that followed, you can see him actively feeding off the anger and hostility that’s coming of the audience, and using that hostility to further fuel the creative process. It’s punk. It’s exactly what Iggy Pop did later. But, for Dylan, the stakes were even higher. I mean, it’s an incredible and frightening thing to be met with that kind of hostility after you’ve experienced all that adulation. He used the fear as a creative tool as well. That’s pretty hardcore.’As well as playing with the myth of Bob Dylan, Haynes tackles two tricky periods in the singer’s life: his break-up with his first wife, Sara, and his late-Eighties born-again Christian period. Haynes dramatises the latter interlude by making Dylan (Christian Bale) an actual church pastor who has turned his back on fame but who still sings sermons to his flock. Absurd, maybe, but back around the time of Slow Train Coming and Saved, when Dylan was using the stage as a pulpit, that same scenario did not seem that far-fetched.The philandering, mid-Seventies’ Dylan, played by Heath Ledger, and re-christened Robbie, is perhaps the most enigmatic, and the most intriguing, presence in the film. This is the Dylan who wrote ‘Blood on the Tracks’, and the plaintive broken-hearted ballad ‘Sara’, perhaps the most naked cri de couer he ever wrote. In I’m Not There, Charlotte Gainsbourg plays an artist called Claire, who seems to be an amalgam of both Sara and Dylan’s first serious girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. The fact that Gainsbourg is a dead ringer for the young Patti Smith makes the scene in which Bob/ Robbie rails against feminists generally, and women poets in particular, even more surreal. I ask Haynes if the rant, which culminates with the line ‘chicks can never be poets’, has any basis in fact?’My research is kind of blurred and from so many sources, but that was actually something Joan Baez recounted.’ Baez is played to a tee by Julianne Moore, whose cameo is almost worth the price of admission alone. ‘Wasn’t she great? She just nailed her. Joan was, like, so proud and still carefree somehow. It wasn’t like she had an axe to grind or anything like that, it has to be said, though he did treat her like crap. I love the fact she doesn’t come over as the poor pathetic folkie who’s been left behind. She just kind of tells it like it is.’All the same, I can’t imagine Dylan being too happy with the Robbie section. ‘Oh, I’m not so worried about that,’ shrugs Haynes. ‘I mean, I was not exactly being historical or literal. If anything, even less so than elsewhere in the film.’In the end, it is Haynes’s freewheeling approach to Dylan’s life and work that both makes and breaks I’m Not There. His decision, for instance, to have Christian Bale play two separate incarnations of Dylan works on a conceptual level, but you may find yourself wondering, as I did, why Bob Neuwirth, Dylan’s annoyingly ubiquitous sidekick from 1966, suddenly morphs into John Lennon. Or why Mr Jones from ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ returns as Sheriff Pat Garrett.Does it all add up? Not really. Nor, I suspect, was it meant to. It is, after all, a cinematic attempt to capture Dylan’s singular creative dynamic. It is also an unapologetically experimental film of the kind that does not tend to make it onto even the art house circuit these days.’I don’t know that it makes sense,’ Blanchett told the New York Times recently, ‘and I don’t know whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you in some kind of other place. It might make sense when you are half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live.’This is undoubtedly true, but it misses the crucial point that music works on a different, and arguably deeper, emotional and psychological level than film. Ironically, nowhere is this more apparent than when actual Dylan songs are used in the film. Every time this happened, my instinct was to close my eyes and listen, undistracted by images that strove to interpret that song.When ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ starts rolling and tumbling out of the cinema speakers, you might find yourself wondering, as I did, why anyone would even attempt to get inside Dylan’s mind. The song hits you in some other place,, a place that even a film as wildly inventive, utterly infuriating, and relentlessly referential as this one cannot really connect with. In the end, I respect the fact that Todd Haynes tried to, and tried to in a way that somehow reflects the restless, re-inventive spirit of its subject. The film may well be a glorious failure, but I’ll say one thing for Todd Haynes - he’s got a lot of nerve. I’m Not There is released nationwide on 21 DecemberThey seek it thereGeoff Dyer on ‘I’m Not There’, the song, a Dylan mysteryI first heard ‘I’m Not There’ at the apartment of American novelist and Dylan nut Jonathan Lethem, who announced that what we were about to hear was ‘the Holy Grail of Dylan bootlegs’. He was not exaggerating.Bootleg recordings are not the preserve of crazies like Lethem. Dylan’s haphazard, even indifferent attitude to the recording process means that his unreleased material is not just fascinating but essential. The writer Robert Polito even asks: ‘What if Dylan’s illicit material - bootlegs of live performances, studio outtakes, rehearsals, and unreleased songs - ultimately prove… his most vital, revelatory, and enduring work?’The idea of perfection has always been anathema to Dylan. Terrific turns of phrase and complete banalities exist side by side in every song. For every improvement made to the released version of ‘Idiot Wind’ (the gale ‘blowing like a circle round your skull/ From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol’ first comes ’round your jaw/ From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras’) there is a corresponding loss. But one of his best ever rhymes simply disappears without trace: ‘Figured I’d lost you anyway, why go on, what’s the use?/ In order to get in a word with you I’d've had to come up with some excuse.’ Masterpieces such as ‘Blind Willie McTell’ or ‘Up to Me’ also made way for blatantly inferior songs on their originally intended albums.Dylan continually reworks his material, for richer, for poorer. Many Dylan songs exist in dozens of different versions in terms of the music, arrangements and lyrics.And then there is ‘I’m Not There’. It was part of the loose batch of recordings made in 1967, after Dylan had retired to Woodstock in the wake of his motorcycle crash. These recordings were done either at Dylan’s house or the Big Pink, the house in West Saugerties rented by some members of the Band. Bootlegs of these sessions enjoyed wide circulation before a selection was released as The Basement Tapes in 1975. ‘I’m Not There’ was not included, nor has it been included in the ‘official’ bootleg series. So in a sense it is still not there.How many times has Dylan performed ‘Like a Rolling Stone’? A thousand? Five thousand? Some performances vary in interest but the sheer abundance means that the value of any one of the competing live versions is relative rather than absolute. ‘I’m Not There’ exists only in one recording - and it scarcely exists even in that one. Whereas ‘Rolling Stone’ begins abruptly with that famous, attention-grabbing rimshot - this song starts NOW! - ‘I’m Not There’ is already under way by the time the recording renders it audible, as if taping it were an afterthought, or as if the song just drifted into almost-existence. Not only is the song obviously incomplete, so is the usual way of referring to it. The full title is ‘I’m Not There (1956)’, though what the bracketed date refers to is anybody’s guess. The words of the refrain are written, fixed; the rest of the time Dylan is free-associating, improvising, coaxing the unborn song into life. Many of the words are inaudible or incomprehensible. We wait for the blur of words to slip back in to temporary focus: ‘Now when I [unintelligible] I was born to love her/But she knows that the kingdom weighs [waits?] so high above her/And I run but I race but it’s not too fast or soon[?]/But I don’t perceive her, I’m not there, I’m gone.’Dylan never finished the song. Never re-recorded or reworked, it exists only as this sketch. In this respect, it bears comparison with other famous, uncompleted fragments (Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’) that come unbidden and then melt away (’fled is that music’).When I first heard the song it seemed threadbare, insufficiently formed to sustain the weight of expectation generated by its mythic status. But, in the weeks that followed, I couldn’t stop playing it. As I listened over and over, it began to furl itself around me and I began to see that its incompleteness is essential to its effect.Just as this issue was going to press a blog sensationally announced that in the course of preparing the I’m Not There soundtrack a ‘newly unearthed version’ of the title song had been discovered in Neil Young’s vaults. It turns out, however, that it is just a slightly cleaner recording of the same performance. Phew! The ‘I’m Not There’ soundtrack (Columbia), featuring the song, is out nowThere was this movie I seen … ‘Dylan on screenBob Dylan is a fan of the movies: that much is clear from a close reading of his lyrics and songs like ‘Brownsville Girl’ (which quotes from The Gunfighter). Film references aside, much as Dylan has tried his hand at fiction (with Tarantula) and painting (his first exhibition opened in Germany last month ), the artistic possibilities of the movie camera have attracted him. Dylan hired D A Pennebaker following his success with Don’t Look Back, a record of his 1965 UK tour, to make a film about his next visit to Blighty. The result, Eat The Document featured a number of surreal happenings. It can be seen as a dry-run for the four-hour Renaldo and Clara, an exceedingly bizarre film of the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. It, too, remains little seen. But for bonkers, nothing quite matches 2003’s motion picture Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan wrote (under a pseudonym) and starred in. It bombed.Dylan’s pedigree as a straight actor is dubious, as anyone who has sat through Hearts of Fire (with Rupert Everett) will surely testify. Still, in his recent ads for Cadillac cars, he’s as mean, moody and magnificent as you could wish for.
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