I'm Not There: Movie Review (2008)

Directed by Todd Haynes, written by Haynes and Oren Moverman, 135 minutes, rated R.

Last year was a good year for Cate Blanchett even if the movies in which she appeared weren't very good themselves.

In Todd Haynes' bizarre biopic "I'm Not There," the actress co-stars in an Academy Award-nominated performance as Jude, one of several characters meant to recall a fraction of the personality of the famously complicated musician Bob Dylan.

She is an intriguing choice of casting, to say the least, and the good news is that Blanchett, one of the most savvy and intelligent actors working today, pulls off the gender-bending just as seamlessly as you would expect.

Along with Dylan's music, which is interlaced throughout (his name, however, is never spoken, though the singer does appear at the end), Blanchett is the best part of the movie. If you decide to see it, she's the reason to see it — she deserves her Best Supporting Actress nomination just as she deserves her Best Actress nomination for her performance in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age."

Unfortunately, the trouble with "I'm Not There" is that the movie itself isn't there. None of it adds up. From Haynes and Oren Moverman's script, the movie is a gimmicky, frustrating bear that is a struggle to sit through.

The film's conceit is that it features six actors portraying different sides of Dylan's persona at different points in the musician's life.

Beyond Blanchett, who nails the singer's cagey rhythms just as neatly as she captured Katharine Hepburn's intensity in Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," those actors include a very good Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin, the latter of whom joins Blanchett in being the most unusual choice to play a version of Dylan since the actor is, after all, 13 years old and black.

While Haynes' intent is obvious — he believes that Dylan is so difficult to peg, several actors, regardless of gender or race, could portray him — the follow-through is a failure. This fractured jumble of vignettes is so self-aware and dull, you wonder what's the point of Haynes being experimental if his experiment doesn't yield something that's compelling or, at the very least, entertaining. Insight might have been a goal, but there's no insight here. Instead, too much of the movie feels like a strained, artsy con.

Indeed, Haynes is so determined to deliver a piece of "art" designed to mirror the enigma that is Bob Dylan, that he makes the decision to forgo any trace of narrative structure. He's attempting to reflect the controlled chaos of Dylan's mind, but the result is just canned chaos for the audience. This movie could be cut any number of ways and reassembled, and it wouldn't matter. It would remain the same movie — one that isn't recommended.

Grade: C-

View the trailer below: