| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

I'm Not There. Dir. by Todd Haynes. Prod. by Christine Vachon. John Goldwyn Productions, Killer Films, and John Wells Productions, 2007. 135 mins. (Weinstein Company, http://weinsteinco.com/)
Bob Dylan's quest has always been an existential one—willful, mysterious, wondrous. Appropriately, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is very much attuned to the transformations in Dylan's odyssey. To foreground Dylan's protean style as an artist and performer, six actors portray various personae over the course of his career. This postmodern construction, employed willy-nilly throughout the film through intensive cross-cutting, privileges fluidity, rupture, and multiplicity in order to refract the breadth and flux of a long creative life. The viewer, delightfully deranged by such kaleidoscopic time-tripping, leaves the theater with a renewed appreciation for Dylan's many selves, stylistic innovations, and uncanny knack for turning his work and image into a compelling aesthetic object time and again. Although admirable and adventurous, especially for representing Dylan's Houdini-like ability to escape any fixed identity, Haynes's experimental film—which reverses our usual assumptions about stasis and change—also leaves the viewer wondering about continuity, integration, and the big question that plagues us all: Can we ever truly escape the burden of ourselves?	1
The existential struggle between being and becoming is unwittingly signaled in the opening of the film. As the credits roll, Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" plays offscreen. At first glance, it is the perfect road song to accompany the jumbled, chopped-up narrative and chaotic structure of the film. But, as the title indicates, one is stuck inside the very medium of mobility. To complicate matters, the song begins and ends on the Bowery—skid row—the very symbol of entrapment. That circular structure signals repetition, defeat, the alpha and omega of the self's surrealistic rambling, which occurs in parenthesis. Haynes is not attuned to this dialectic, nor to the undertow of Dylan's oeuvre, and so we get only the surface appeal of the shape-shifting artist. We get the myth and mobility of Dylan unstuck in time and place. We get his penchant for seeking freedom and liberation without the knowledge that "but for the sky there are no fences facin'."	. . .

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