Bob dylan biography movie im not there

The release of A Complete Unknownon Christmas Day brought the legend of Bob Dylan to a new generation, starring one of the era's most beloved actors, Timothée Chalamet, as the perennial American icon. For some, it might be their first exposure to the legendary artist; for others, it might be a new telling of a story that they already know by heart. But while A Complete Unknown might be the first film focused solely on Dylan's early years, it's not the first film to explore what makes him such a mythical figure in pop culture.

There have been documentaries like Martin Scorsese's comprehensive No Direction Home from 2005, or D.A. Pennebaker's fly-on-the-wall look at Dylan's 1965 U.K. tour Don't Look Back, all of which capture something of the artist, but never a complete picture. For an artist as notoriously slippery as Bob Dylan, possibly no single film could completely distill his essence for the screen. But one film probably comes closest to capturing the spirit of its subject, and does so in a very unconventional way: Todd Haynes's I'm Not There.

How 'I'm Not There' Explores the Legend of Bob Dylan

Released in 2007, I'm Not There explores the many facets of Dylan's life and artistry, but not through a conventional music biopic. Instead, Haynes uses six different actors who each play a different character based on some part of Dylan's public persona. There's Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, a famous protest singer who flees the limelight and resurfaces years later as a born-again Christian, combining Dylan's reluctant "voice of a generation" early years and his bizarre dalliance with Christianity in the '70s and '80s. Heath Ledger (in the last film released before his death) plays Robbie Clark, a young actor who becomes famous for playing Rollins in a movie based on his life, the fame estranging him from his artist wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and his kids.

Marcus Carl Franklin plays a young vagabond going by the name Woody Guthrie, adopting a Depression-era itinerant lifestyle well into the 1960s, reflecting Dylan's own early Dust-Bowl affectations. Richard Gere plays an aging Billy the Kid, living a secluded life until modernity comes knocking on his door, representing Dylan's late-'60s Americana explorations and possibly his more secluded later years. Acting as a sort of meta-commentary on the action, Ben Whishaw plays a version of the 19th Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, one of Dylan's biggest influences, anachronistically seated before some kind of government interrogation panel.

Easily the film's most celebrated performance, however, comes from Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, a wiry, sunglasses-sporting avatar of Dylan's bratty, amphetamine-fueled mid-'60s era, after he'd left the folk scene behind and upset many of his longtime fans. Besides Bale's, Blanchett's character is probably the closest to an actual portrayal of Dylan, and her performance drew the movie's biggest acclaim, netting her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress and winning a Golden Globe.

By exploring Dylan's life and career in a more abstract, symbolic way, Haynes acknowledges that a figure as mercurial as Dylan, with as many distinct evolutions, could never be approached in a more traditional form, and any attempt to do so would be far too limiting. While A Complete Unknown attempts to capture some version of Dylan as a flesh-and-blood man, I'm Not There focuses on Dylan as an icon, exploring the ways he exists in the public imagination.

'I'm Not There' as Cinema

While it's obviously in conversation with Dylan's life and career, I'm Not There is also in conversation with the form of cinema itself. Haynes uses different cinematic styles for each character, drawing from the music documentary form for the Jack Rollins segment, '60s French and Italian New Wave for the story of Jude Quinn, '70s New Hollywood for Billy the Kid, and beyond. This sense of formal experimentation reflects the contradictions and shifts in perspective inherent in its subject. No one film can capture the essence of Dylan, so Haynes essentially makes six different films in one.

The lines between the stories begin to blur as the film goes on, with characters crossing the boundaries of time and space and occasionally appearing in other stories altogether. Towards the end, Billy the Kid encounters Woody dressed as Charlie Chaplin, and later rides in the back of a modern car. Haynes also blurs these lines by double-casting certain actors; for one, Bruce Greenwood plays both a British journalist who interviews Jude Quinn, and Billy the Kid's rival, the lawman Pat Garrett. All this self-conscious artifice speaks to the public image of Dylan, who has always kept the public at a distance through deliberate obfuscation.

I'm Not There is far from a straightforward telling of Dylan's life, but it is ultimately the only film that has managed to capture something approaching his spirit on the screen. A Complete Unknown might purport to be a more grounded look at Dylan as a real person, but it's ultimately as much about mythmaking as I'm Not There, as awestruck admirers watch Dylan reverently with the sense that they're watching important history unfolding. Haynes's film acknowledges that Bob Dylan is too unconventional a subject to be approached in a conventional way, and it captures the essence of its subject better than any other film. Anyone who wants to explore more of Dylan after watching A Complete Unknown should make it a point to check it out.