Music Blogs

I'm Not There amazed me. One reason it worked for me is because it's drenched in Dylan's music. I wasn't expecting that. Most of the time, it's Dylan's voice when 'Blind Willie McTell' or 'Moonshiner' or 'Idiot Wind' (the slow, acoustic version) suddenly erupt on the soundtrack – to huge emotional effect. Other times, instrumental teasers from 'Man In The Long Black Coat' or 'Nashville Skyline Rag' are planted in the mix like fragments of dreams you can't quite focus on.

All the pre-release publicity had revolved around the film's actors. Cate Blanchett is Girl Dylan! Marcus Carl Franklin is African-American Boy Dylan! But the film itself unfolds like a kaleidoscopic dream where the pieces never quite meet. A bit like me and my friends scratching our heads in the 1960s and 1970s and earnestly wondering how John Wesley Harding related to Blonde On Blonde, or how Slow Train Coming related to Blood On the Tracks. Well, they don't.

In his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan dwells on the moment when he stumbled across Rimbaud's declaration "Je est un autre" which translates into English: "I is someone else". Dylan writes: "When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wish someone would have mentioned it to me earlier." That insight has sustained Dylan through all his multiple personalities: finger-pointing folkie, rock & roll rebel, Nashville good ol' boy ("Oh me oh my, love that country pie"), tormented lover, Born Again Christian. When he performed on his first album, aged 21, he was trying to summon up the voice of a 60-year-old blues singer.

That insight sustains this movie because Haynes and his team have been able to match a visual style to each image of Dylan's life – from the burnt out black & white textures of Fellini's 8½ which seem to lock Blanchett inside an amphetamine-fuelled bubble of superstardom to the mellow colour photography of McCabe and Mrs Miller which frames Richard Gere. I was surprised by the long Gere sequence. He behaves like an ex-gunslinger hiding out – a recluse in the backwoods. But all these strange characters and Civil War soldiers and circus animals and snake oil salesmen roll past, capturing the mood of those bizarre Basement Tape songs: 'Please Mrs. Henry,' 'Open The Door Homer.' It seems to be set in the realm that Greil Marcus called "The Old, Weird America."

And there's a strange visionary flash where Gere peers into the landscape and has a glimpse of Vietnam. It made perfect sense to me. There's a moment in the Sing Out! interview with Dylan in 1968 (when Dylan was secluded in Woodstock) when Happy Traum asked Dylan "Why don't you speak out against the Vietnam War?" and Dylan replied: "That really doesn't exist. It's not for or against the war. I'm speaking of a certain painter and he's all for the war. He's ready to go over there himself. And I can comprehend him. People just have their own views. Anyway, how do you know that I'm not, as you say, for the war?"

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Will this work appeal to anyone who knows little of Dylan's work and life? I have no idea. But then this film isn't a biopic, this film works in a free association surreal way, like 'Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again' or 'Highlands' works. It's true to the spirit of one of Dylan's most mysterious songs, a song which goes places where no words can go, a song which can at last be heard officially for the first time because it's on the I'm Not There original soundtrack, a song which gives this film its title:

"Now, when I keep believing I was born to love her /But she knows that the kingdom waits so high above her /And I run but I race, but it's not too fast or slow /But I don't deceive her. I'm not there, I'm gone…"