Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3627 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-07-14
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 130 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Unapologetically audacious, I'm Not There is more post-modern puzzle than by-the-numbers biopic. A title card sets the scene: "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan." Yet the film features no figure by that name. Instead, writer/director Todd Haynes presents six characters, each incarnating different stages in the artist's career. Perfume's Ben Whishaw, a black-clad poet, serves as a slippery sort of narrator. The action begins with the wanderings of an 11-year-old black runaway named "Woody Guthrie" (Marcus Carl Franklin)--his raucous duet with Richie Havens on "Tombstone Blues" is a highlight--and ends with a silver-haired Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) watching the Old West die before his eyes. In the interim, there's the folk singer-turned-preacher (Christian Bale), the actor (Heath Ledger), and the rock star (Cate Blanchett, who has Don't Look Back Dylan down to a science). The chronology is purposefully non-linear, and editor Jay ! Rabinowitz cuts rapidly, Jean-Luc Godard-style, between cinéma vérité black-and-white and saturated colour, Richard Lester-like slapstick and Fellini-inspired surrealism (Ed Lachman served as cinematographer).

What makes the picture fun for Dylan fans--and potentially frustrating for neophytes--is that every album and movie bears an alternate title. Ledger's Robbie, for instance, stars in "Grain of Sand," actually a reference to the Pete Seeger song. As in Haynes' glam rock reverie Velvet Goldmine, the trickery involves the entire cast. While Julianne Moore plays former lover Alice, a dead ringer for Joan Baez, Michelle Williams embodies elusive scenester Coco, i.e. Edie Sedgwick. If I'm Not There is less affecting than Control, the year's other big music film, it rewards repeat viewings like few biographical features. The soundtrack mixes originals with covers, like Jim James's heartfelt "Goin' to Acapulco." --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Special Features

- A conversation with Todd Haynes

- The making of the soundtrack

- A tribute to Heath Ledger

Synopsis
Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven) delivers this dazzling, experimental take on the life of popular music's most revered and enigmatic artist: Bob Dylan. In keeping with the impossible-to-pin-down nature of Dylan himself, Haynes chose to cast six different actors to portray several incarnations of the groundbreaking troubadour. The result is a challenging, sprawling work that spans several decades and genres. Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin) is a young black child with a folk music obsession; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) is an upstart folksinger whose protest songs have ignited an entire generation; Arthur (Ben Wishaw) is a Rimbaud-esque figure who has begun to embrace a new form of lyrical poetry; Robbie (Heath Ledger) is a well-known actor whose marriage to the lovely Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) crumbles under the weight of his lifestyle; Billy (Richard Gere) is a slippery frontiersman who echoes Dylan's infatuation with the Old West and American folklore; and, finally, there is the substance-abusing, confrontational Jude (Cate Blanchett), who represents Dylan in the turbulent mid-1960s.


Much in the same way that Dylan appropriated a vast array of musical styles to create his own vernacular, Haynes does the same thing with I'm Not There, using his expansive knowledge of movie history to pay homage to a variety of movements and genres (Godard, Fellini, Lester, etc.). The typically extraordinary cinematographer Edward Lachman outdoes even himself this time around, incorporating so many different visual styles that it's impossible to decide which is the most beautiful. While the cast all fare well in their roles, it is Cate Blanchett who runs away with the picture, proving once again that she is one of the finest actors the movies have ever seen.

Customer Reviews

Six other sides of Dylan, one great Haynes film!
Todd Haynes' I'm Not There is a hugely exciting and incredibly beautiful film. It gives a sweeping view not just of Dylan's music, but also of his times from the 1950s to the 1980s. It is also the first time that Dylan has licensed his entire back catalogue to be used in a film.
Deservedly the film received a special Jury prize and a best actress award for Cate Blanchett at the 2007 Venice Film Festival.
Dylan is played by six different actors, playing six abstractions of his personality. Each of these abstractions inhabit a cinematic world of their own, the associations stretching from Fellini's 8 ½, Hal Ashby's Shampoo to made-for-television documentaries of the early 1980s. Maverick cinematographer Ed Lachman recently said that Haynes created the rhythms of the Dylan's music in the film, using free-associations you're allowed in music and reinterpreting those as film.
This is a film that eschews the easy biopic route, forcing the spectators to use their own intelligence. It is the closest any film can ever hope to get to Dylan's music and his own Chronicles. If someone calls this film pretentious, it is only as pretentious as Dylan himself, in that he always played with peoples expectations and tried something unpredictably new. I'm Not There certainly deserves to be seen more than once and preferably on a very big screen. Don't believe those bad reviewers, they are liars.

the old, weird america
I'd really just like to say a word or two to those who persist in describing the Richard Gere segment of this film as its weakest point: please go back and listen to The Basement Tapes, pay attention to the sleevenotes, and if you've got the time and intellectual energy, read Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic. You will recognise all the strange characters who populate that eerie place that seems to hover between this world and some other (Marcus's Invisible Republic, or The Old, Weird America), and you will see why Gere's character is so crucial to this kaleidoscopic view of Dylan's art. I found this part of Haynes's admirably ambitious movie to be the most thrilling, and Jim James's otherworldly rendition of Goin' To Acapulco the most stunning piece of music (outside Dylan's own, naturally). Much of Dylan's best work seems always to be just beyond our grasp, which is partly why it is so compelling, but there are gateways to a deeper understanding available to us if we can be bothered to look for them. Like all gateways they can let us in or they can keep us out. Our choice.

Annoyingly Good.
Plot:

Biopic of legendary singer Bob Dylan through seven different stages in the artist's life played by six different actors. The events that follow are drawn as much from Dylan's songs as from his actual biography.

My Review:

In short, `I'm Not There' is restless, brilliant, and so far up its own arse. It's that kind of film: abundantly engulfing with its self-ego centric demeanour, with the subject that's wholeheartedly likeable.

It's all about Bobby; it's a personal elegy to him, and all albeit an allegory that tells parts of his life through the use of several actors who prove to be a well ensemble of players. It's not in order, it goes from best to worst parts of his life, and it has to be; fractionally chronological as you are meant to see his life through a mix of good and bad times.

Each segment entwines with the rest, seeming almost unnoticeable. As if you almost wait to see two different Bobby's run past each other, like some corny way to go from one story to another.

The Man Dylan, who is it we suspect is his true self? Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Charlotte Gainsbourg, etc all play a part in Dylan's mayhem lived lifestyle. Heath Ledger playing the easily absolved actor who could have been bigger as apposed to the singer who was made. Heath is also the failed husband, and then there's Ben Whishaw's Dylan who fathoms and tries to connect his life with the poet Rimbaud.

Cate Blanchett's Dylan gives a depiction of his controversial years, where he seemed lost on what his direction of music would turn to. Blanchett is the one who most closely captures the familiar inner conflict and the more upstaged conflict that wasn't in public's eye.

Verdict:

Played by multi-talented actors, we are given a multi-faceted biopic of Bob Dylan in his prime. It may irritate, fine wined for some. Amazing plethora-ed depiction. 8/10.