I’m Not There

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How do you film the life of an artist as protean, elusive, egomaniacal, imaginative, surprising, and heavily mythologized as Bob Dylan? Haynes’s playful, gutsy biopic, in which six actors take turns embodying one of America’s most legendary musicians, considers that question and swallows it whole. In I’m Not There, Dylan emerges in the form of, variously, an 11-year-old African-American folk singer who claims to be Woody Guthrie reincarnated, a famous musician prone to conversions and acts of dramatic abandonment, an actor hired to play that musician in a biopic within the film, and the first of the two heroes of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—a film for which Dylan did the soundtrack. It was in Haynes’s movie that Heath Ledger gave one of his best performances, but the star of the show is Cate Blanchett, who turns Dylan’s rock-star persona into a heroic, electrifying showcase for her own remarkable gifts. An NYFF45 Selection.