I'm Not There (2007)

What makes it different from others?

Too much of everything

Best movie of this year hands down!

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This movie jumps back and forth between six personalities supposed to represent Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie is an 11-year-old African American hobo. Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) is a teenage poet. Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) sings with Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore) in the 60's protesting the war. Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) plays Jack Rollins in a biography. Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) is a folk singer who starts playing the electric guitar. Billy McCarty (Richard Gere) is secretly the outlaw Billy the Kid.The most compelling performance and the most audacious attempt belongs to Cate Blanchett. I wouldn't mind a whole movie with Blanchett as Dylan. The way this movie works is very random and artsy. I would prefer concentrating on any one of the personalities rather than following all six. It's ambitious but it's structurally scattered.

The films idea is pretty solid. Dylan has so many sides to him that he is round. A blues musician said that about him in 1964. Sadly, the execution of the concept fails. And the writing is equally as bad. Perhaps some of you enjoyed the movie but I saw it as a complete failure. The feeling I was left with after the film made me dislike Dylan...even though he's been my inspiration for so many years. I've read over twenty biographies of him as well as his his own 'Chronicles Vol. 1' and nothing within the film demonstrates what he contributed to music. The actors did a fairly good job with what they had. The writing is so far off and only distracts from the real story. The concept was good but the directing falls short and doesn't stand out in any way. If you are at all interested in Dylan and his art, watch 'Don't Look Back' or 'Renaldo and Clara'. The latter is a bit zany but shows a real side to Dylan and his friends.

If there was was ever a film that could embody Bob Dylan, this is it, and that being said it is no means a biography. Rather than trying to encapsulate Dylan's life in any serial fashion, Todd Haynes opts to intersperse the different incarnations of the singer in both his music and personal life, imbuing surrealism and pure fiction to explain the chaos of his life. That being said, I wouldn't recommend this movie to people who aren't familiar with Bob Dylan or the musical movements of the 1960s-1970s; references like Pete Seeger trying to chop the electric cables with an axe at the Newport Folk Festival or tongue-in-cheek humor such as Dylan shouting at Jesus on the cross to "bring back your old stuff" would definitely go over most people's heads without any background.

I'm not a spoiler type of guy, but i'll mention a lil bit of this and a lil bit of that. First of all the cast is spectacular with majestic performances, and if someone would ask me why i think this way, i have a suggestion... Please watch Scorsese's No direction home- Bob Dylan and watch closely, and then you can see why Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger and Christian Bale did a fantastic job, pure art. You're not there, you are everywhere... That's exactly how i feel about Dylan. There were a lot of changes in his life, pure chaos, but many of us saw the beauty of that chaos, the spirit of Dylan's believes,lyrics, poetry. "I go where i please". Thank you, i loved it.