Director	Todd Haynes
Length	135 min
Certificate	15
Rating	Film making: 3  Personal enjoyment: 4

Six people - four men (Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and Ben Wishaw), one woman (Cate Blanchett), and one boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) - play musicians, poets and icons at different stages in their lives and careers. All are variations on personas Bob Dylan has adopted at different points in his life, though none share his name, and all are entirely different people. Moments from Dylan’s life - some legendary, some private, and some imagined - are enacted by these vivid and varied characters, occasionally exaggeratedly, sometimes in a playfully figurative, or even mocking, manner.

The name ‘Bob Dylan’ is never spoken in this film, and, in many ways, I’m Not There does not seem to be about Dylan at all. Instead it is about issues of fame in a postmodern society, the notion and form of the biopic, and broader problems of representation in late 20th century culture. Dylan and his legend are used here, then, merely as a jumping-off point that allows Haynes to explore ideas and aesthetic problems that few Hollywood films have ever concerned themselves with addressing. He seems concerned with questions such as: how can a linear narrative sum up a person’s life? How is public identity constructed in an age of accelerated image-production and consumption? What is the relationship between politics and popular culture, and how has it changed over the last forty years?

If you think these questions sound like (caricatured and too-broad) essay titles, you would be right. At heart, I’m Not There is far closer to being a ‘visual essay’ than a traditional biopic. Indeed, looked at in a certain way, this film is almost a spoof of the biopic form (in that sense it will be interesting to see how it relates to another upcoming parody, the much broader Judd Apatow-scripted Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story!), and it is partly this playfulness and humour that allows it to work. A film conceived of primarily as a self-conscious deconstruction of particular cinematic practices can so easily (as with some Godard) feel dry and uninvolving. Here, however, Haynes’ lightness of touch (as well as, very importantly, the unpretentiousness of the Dylan songs perpetually spinning on the soundtrack) generally allow him to avoid steering the film into dour ponderousness.

The central conceit does not work for all of its characters all of the time, and - perhaps unavoidably - some segments of the film shine brighter than others. Blanchett and Ledger, for example, in the most ‘conventional’ biopic storylines, are given complex, juicy human parts to play with; Wishaw and Gere, meanwhile, are asked to embody pointedly refracted characters, the former largely unmoored from any story context, the latter situated in a studied but unbelievable one. This means that one’s identification and concentration unavoidably fluctuate, being grabbed one minute and allowed to lie fallow the next. As well as this, the non-linear structuring of the film - while clearly entirely appropriate to its project - occasionally drags the pace down to a grind, particularly in the latter stages, which struggle to adequately wrap up the spiralling meta-narratives.

Yet there are many diverse pleasures to be gained from I’m Not There, and it is a testament to its refreshingly multifaceted nature that they are so various. As an intellectual exercise, a lyrical ode to a pop culture icon, an often extremely beautiful whistle-stop tour of cinematic styles, and a tribute to indeterminacy, it will doubtless delight and enrage viewers in equal measure. While certainly not an unqualified success, then, Haynes’ latest is a bold challenge of a movie, and one that demands to be met.