Philadelphia Weekly

The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story early last month on the new Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There. The story was titled: "This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie." When asked if he agrees with the title, Todd Haynes--the film's friendly, well-spoken director, in town for a siege of interviews--replies with a simple, "No."

Well, of course he doesn't ... right? If it sounds crazy to even consider that a movie concerning Bob Dylan might not actually be "about" him, then you might not know much about I'm Not There.

In one sense Robert Sullivan, who wrote the article, is right. The name Bob Dylan appears only in the opening credits, where he's billed as "inspiring" the film. Dylan himself appears in concert footage in the final moment while covers of his songs litter the soundtrack.

But otherwise we jump around six main characters with names like Billy, Jude, John and Woody Guthrie, played by people like Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin--a young black kid playing a train-hopping guitarist. Is it really so out-there for Sullivan to assert that "Todd Haynes' film about Dylan is as much about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan"?

"I think it's about as close to a Bob Dylan movie as you can get," Haynes explains. "That's not to say there's only a singular Bob Dylan movie that's out there. I think Dont Look Back is a Bob Dylan movie. Renaldo and Clara, love it or hate it, is a Bob Dylan movie. And maybe A Face in the Crowd is a Bob Dylan movie."

That Haynes lumps in A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan's 1957 drama with Andy Griffith as a folkie turned demagogue, with D.A. Pennebaker's documentary on Dylan's 1965 tour and Dylan's own notorious four-hour surrealist drama says a lot about the discursive, restless style of I'm Not There. (Haynes says Crowd wound up figuring heavily in constructing the Franklin segment.)

"I knew a conventional, singular narrative would never suffice to tell Dylan's story, so that was something I excluded from my options right away," Haynes explains.

The result? A film even weirder than you've heard. There's virtually no narrative or dramatic throughline. References--from not just Dylanology but culture, music and films--fly fast and hard. And all the while Haynes intercuts madly between the six sections.

When asked if there was ever a temptation to make the film easier for the audience, particularly Dylan neophytes, Haynes says no.

"I would say the best way to experience the film is how you experience a Dylan song. There are narrative elements that you pick up, but that's not really why you're listening." Still, Haynes claims he didn't try to "mimic" a Dylan song, though he "took to heart the formal experiments he made in his music."

One of these results in the intercutting style. "There came a point when he became consciously interested in time travel within a single song or a single record," says Haynes. "That was most clearly articulated during the Blood on the Tracks era, when he was studying with a painter who proposed this idea of art as a single canvas that could contain multiple narratives.

"I think when we look back on our lives, we realize we do occupy certain selves and attitudes and personas at different times," Haynes notes. "Life doesn't come in a nice narrative package with a culmination of meaning. It comes in a jumble."

But with Dylan it was a little different. "This is someone who kept producing material--massive amounts of it with every step he took. So there are embodiments of who he was left over. There's evidence that he was a protest singer in 1964. But that's not him anymore. That's a curious out-of-body experience that artists have to contend with as they move forward--all the echoes of what they left behind."

Though he's best known for 2002's Far From Heaven, Haynes, 46, has a history with radical musical biopics. His 1987 short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story tells the anorexic pop star's story with an all-Barbie doll cast. In 1990 Superstar was hit with a copyright infringement suit by the Carpenter family over the use of their songs, though Haynes says he hasn't checked in with them in nearly a decade.

"I think maybe it's time to try again," he says.

Velvet Goldmine came in 1998, a phantasmagoric look at glam centered around a Bowie-esque star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Bowie himself refused to let his music be used in the film.

For I'm Not There, Haynes did clear the use of Dylan's songs, but says he's never spoken with him directly. Dylan currently has the film's DVD on his tour bus but has yet to report back with a reaction. Haynes also has yet to hear from most of the Dylanologists, though brags that Greil Marcus, author of the beloved Invisible Republic, about The Basement Tapes, is a big supporter.

Says Haynes, "With Dylan in particular, there are tons of literate, poetic, philosophical or political passages in the music and the phrases that jump right out and speak to your life. But they're not necessarily coherent in the way a story is.

"I don't understand all the references in his lyrics," Haynes says. "But that doesn't keep me from feeling like I can fully partake of his music."