Philadelphia Weekly

I'm Not There--Todd Haynes' astoundingly dense, certifiably insane, preposterously entertaining attempted portrait of the ever-elusive Bob Dylan--isn't just the greatest celebrity biography ever made, it's also a full-frontal formalist assault on the very concept of biopics.

When you stop and think about it, the whole genre is ridiculous. The only constant in anybody's life is change. How can one film, shot in one style, with one Academy-fellating lead performance, do any sort of justice to the side-winding complexities of an entire lifetime?

Not to mention this is Dylan. The man radically changes his public persona more often than some of my friends change their underwear. He's always remained evasive, fiendishly private, half-kidding most of the time and constantly calculating some sort of confounding legend of his own baffling design. The only thing you can ever depend on Bob Dylan to do is exactly what you didn't think he was going to do, and usually he's smirking about it afterward. What's a put-on? Is anything for real?

Haynes finds his way around all the stale bio-chestnuts by casting a half-dozen drastically different Dylans (none of which are even named Bob) and overlapping their separate sagas in a freewheeling pattern of concentric circles, jarringly juxtaposed in contradictory cinematic styles and contrasting color schemes, allowing I'm Not There to drift and riff on contradictions, shock edits and an obstinate, thrilling refusal to pigeonhole the protagonist.

We begin with young Marcus Carl Franklin, a tiny black child with a guitar, calling himself "Woody Guthrie" and singing age-old union anthems while riding boxcars and carrying on as if it's still 1929 and not 1959. Like most of the Dylan stand-ins depicted, he's also totally full of shit, but the characterization speaks volumes regarding our hero's brazen appropriation of bygone cultures for his own benefit.

Cut to a grainy faux-documentary heralding "Jack Rollins, Troubadour of Conscience." It's now Christian Bale sending up Dylan's work-shirt, protest-song days as the darling of the folk scene. Julianne Moore pops up for a killer extended cameo as a Joan Baez wannabe (nailing the mannerisms stone-cold) offering some sober present-day commentary while the doc slowly drifts into Bob's deeply weird 1980s born-again Jesus phase.

I'm Not There continues to fold in upon itself when Heath Ledger turns up as a hotshot young actor rocketed to stardom thanks to his performance in a Jack Rollins biopic (yes, this peculiar snake is now eating its own tail). His alienated, tangled-up-in-blue behavior is actually Blood on the Tracks-era Bob, with Charlotte Gainsbourg standing in for neglected wife Sara, their marital dissolution conveyed evocatively and almost exclusively pictorially with Haynes' stark use of empty rooms and unanswered long-distance phone calls.

Meanwhile Richard Gere drifts through a ruined Western landscape as "Billy the Kid," who, having escaped Pat Garrett's bullets the first time around, discovers his old nemesis sold their town to the interstate highway commission, and now all the suits in Cadillacs are ready to plow on through. It's not just a goof on Dylan's song score for Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but also the kind of perfectly anachronistic, surreal anecdote that would've fit snugly onto Bob's Love and Theft or Modern Times ... and that's even before the giraffe escapes from the zoo.

But what you'll come away from I'm Not There talking about is Cate Blanchett's incendiary, eerily convincing turn as the rock 'n' roll, mid-'60s speed-freak Bob. This is a galvanizing plot thread, conflating elements of Dont Look Back with the infamous "Dylan Goes Electric" tour from a couple years later. Cheerfully mimicking the wide-angle grotesquerie of Fellini's 8 � (there's even Nino Rota music on the soundtrack), Blanchett's scenes are as brilliantly iconic as any rock movie ever made. Haynes cheekily depicts that old "Bob plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival" legend as Blanchett and her band firing away at the audience with machine guns.

Goofy, symbolically overwrought and shooting for the moon, I'm Not There is an often drop-dead funny, rambling collision of acting styles, film techniques and silly, reckless dares. It's also the most go-for-broke, energizing movie I've seen all year, and if you're looking for some sort of easily encapsulated, psychologically sound statement about the subject ... well, I think the title song just about says it all.

I'm Not There
A
Director: Todd Haynes
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Marcus Carl Franklin, Christian Bale.
Opens Wed., Nov. 21