Word: dylan
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...time he arrived in New York, at 19, he had already changed his surname, from Zimmerman to Dylan, after the poet Dylan Thomas; but it was still the gesture of a would-be old-fashioned movie star. He told his new friends that he'd run away from home as a kid, lived as a hobo, joined the circus, traveled to many states (all a fiction). He started his musical life as a singer of traditional ballads, then updated the folk-protest genre pioneered by his idol Woody Guthrie, then ditched that genre for songs of betrayal and alienation, then...
...Blanchett's, of course, is the star turn. both because it's an inspired stunt that she executes with aplomb (she's a more convincing Dylan, no joke, than she was a Katharine Hepburn) and because she's playing Dylan in 1965, the year he lost his old-folkie admirers on his way to rock stardom. With a fabulous frizz do, and a posture stooped by the burden of celebrity, s/he cavorts with the Beatles at a garden party, meets Allen Ginsberg (Arrested Development's David Cross) on the road and - it was always a game with Dylan - deflects reporters...
...Story and Velvet Goldmine, Haynes is fascinated by the drudgery of pop fame - the gilded cages of hotel rooms, cars and private soirées in between gigs - and the drug use that is part of that routine. I'm Not There is more beguiled by this phase of Dylan's career than I am, and gets repetitious and draggy here, like some long folk ballad in its seventh or eighth verse...
...find another way to keep the momentum and the audience's interest from flagging. Haynes, like Taymor, is an avant-gardist with a showman's flair, and his movie has as many styles borrowed from '60s movies - from Richard Lester's Beatles films, from D.A. Pennabaker's cinema verite Dylan documentary, from Woodstock and European art films - as it has actors playing Dylan. This buffet of styles makes the movie consistently diverting, if not engrossing...
...Haynes does know how to end his film: with a minute-or-two view of the real Dylan at a concert, playing an extended vamp of "Mr. Tambourine Man" on the harmonica, focused on freeing the soul of his song through his craft. It's a reminder that, whatever social movements the Beatles and Bob Dylan were drafted to represent, whatever iconic status they've been freighted with for the past 40 years, all they really made was music. And that was enough...