I'm Not There, I'm Gone
“I accept chaos. I’m not sure if chaos accepts me.”
The song “I’m Not There” is, even for 60s Bob Dylan, almost impenetrably cryptic. Full of bizarre malapropisms, made-up portmanteaus, and strange grammatical errors, transcribing the song becomes a strenuous task. Each listen seems to reveal a different turn of phrase. A line you hear at first you might assume that he couldn’t have just said, but then on repeat you realize “oh, no, he DID say that, it just doesn’t make any sense.” And Dylan’s famously poor enunciation is taken to a garbled extreme, not helped by the lo-fi quality of the only recording. The song even seems to start mid-verse, as if recording the track was an afterthought. It’s a mush-mouthed mystery, and it’s probably one of Dylan’s best songs. The song holds a legendary status among Dylan fans- recorded during the Basement Tapes sessions with The Band, it was never released, and the bootleg tapes that circulated were among the rarest on the market. He never performed the song live either, so there was just the one recording. A holy grail for Dylan fanatics. Most assumed it would just become ephemera, an interesting tidbit to bring up at 60s folk music trivia night. That is, until Todd Haynes got involved.
Known for his acid-soaked depictions of the multitude of troubles inherent in modern life, usually from a queer lens, Haynes might not initially seem like a natural fit for a biopic about the most significant folk musician of all time. However, his two previous biopics, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, both subverted the format in unique ways. The former is done entirely with a cast of Barbie Dolls, and due to the unlicensed use of The Carpenter’s music, has never been officially released. The easiest way to watch it is a version on YouTube, copied off a several generations old VHS tape. The latter is about the rise and fall of Not David Bowie, who faked his own death, only to be rediscovered by a nosy journalist (Christian Bale). David Bowie denied the use of his music in the film, so it’s more about the glam rock scene writ large, but Haynes makes no attempt to hide the comparisons. With these precedents, Haynes actually seems like one of the few people who could take what would otherwise be a fairly rote story about a musician who was anything but, and turn into a fascinating exploration of one of the few people in history to become more idea than man.
If people know anything about the film I’m Not There, it’s that six actors play Dylan, including a woman and a black child. It’s often brought up as a novelty, a twist on the typically staid music biopic. And while it is a novel approach, it’s no mere gimmick. It really is the best way to tell Dylan’s story. He is a man of many faces, most of which contradict one another, and all six performers bring a unique twist to the man’s life. We see Dylan as an anti-establishment prophet, a ramblin’ troubadour, a young man strung out on dope, an old man running from his past. The film defies conventional form structurally. It oscillates freely between genres, actors, and film stock, and blends fact and fiction, never differentiating between the two. Bob Dylan is never even mentioned by name. But we hear his voice. The film is flooded with his music, many of which were never officially released, but it’s also filled with covers of his songs (the companion album that includes a number of covers that weren’t featured in the film, is very good). Obviously this represents how influential Dylan was to so many musicians, but it also disorients the viewer. We’re thrown off when we hear classics like “Maggie’s Farm” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” sung in someone else’s voice, but then when we do get to hear Dylan, it’s almost all deep cuts that only circulated on bootlegs. It reminds of us Dylan’s freewheeling persona. He’s a million different people from one day to the next. Although “Bob Dylan” never appears (with the exception of a documentary coda) in the film, it covers all the major events of Dylan’s life, sprinkling in lots of in-jokes for super fans. Each version of Dylan has their own arc, and though they’re all representative of these major stages, in the context of the film, they are their own unique persona. The segments imagine what Dylan’s life would be like if he went down one path or the other. A lesser filmmaker would likely have made each segment its own complete chapter, moving through them linearly, but instead Haynes jumps back and forth between the six freely. This disjointed approach poses the question- could one man really have lived all these lives?
On paper, the whole film sounds like a passion project aimed at only the most diehard heads, and while admittedly having at least a passing familiarity with Dylan’s life is required to really get the most out of your viewing, it’s in the same way that having an encyclopedic knowledge of 60s pop culture enhances the reading of a Thomas Pynchon novel. It’s an addendum that makes the text richer, but I do believe that it could be enjoyed without knowing every little esoteric piece of Bob Dylan lore. I wouldn’t hand this to a novice and use it as a primer, but if you’re a fan of experimental cinema and are tired with the usual biopic tropes, then you can’t do much better than this. Several sequences have a surreal music video logic, particularly the incredible “Ballad of a Thin Man” (probably my favorite Dylan song, covered here by Stephen Malkmus) segment that depicts the descent into counter-culture by Mr. Jones, here represented by an antagonistic journalist who is fed up with Jude Quinn’s (Cate Blanchett’s nervy interpretation of Dylan after he went electric) reinvention, which he dubs insincere. It’s a virtuosic piece of filmmaking, and the whole film is full of similar visual flourishes. When you finally hear the titular song towards the end of the film, we quickly flash through all six Dylans at the end of their stories. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be sitting in the theater, having been weaned on rumors of this track for your whole Dylan-loving life, to finally hear it used in such a moving context.
If you manage to parse through the dyslexic syntax of “I’m Not There,” it reveals itself as a love song, one of simultaneous longing and tribute. Our narrator pines after a woman who he is enamored with, but who seems not to pay him any mind. And when they do get together, he laments that she hurts him, yet his love is still just as strong. Both the song and the film, through the refrain of “I’m not there, I’m gone” are telling us that Bob Dylan does not exist as a person. He is so much more than that. As Greil Marcus, the premier interpreter of Dylan’s work, says, he is not just folk music. He is Folk. But yet, he is mortal, and as susceptible to human foibles like the rest of us. Just another Dylanesque contradiction.
Pictures were recently released of it-boy Timothee Chalamet dressed in Bob Dylan cosplay, hands in pockets, hair perfectly tousled, dressed in the outfit from the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan. The photos give an aura of perfectly manufactured nonchalantness, that kind of faux cool that is so easy to fake, but so difficult to obtain naturally. The film, which is entitled A Complete Unknown (a note my Dad pointed out- why are two Bob Dylan major projects named after lyrics from “Like A Rolling Stone”? He has probably the most iconic catalog of lines of any songwriter; be more creative, Hollyweird), will apparently take an “Altmanesque” approach with an ensemble cast, including Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez (please consult Twitter dot com for a wide range of opinions on this casting decision), Ed Norton as Pete Seeger, and Nick Offerman as Alan Lomax. I don’t want to pass judgements before we even see a trailer; I think Chalamet is a fine actor, and if it gets the youth listening to Bob Dylan, that’s certainly a public good. I wouldn’t say I have any particular affinity for the films of director James Mangold, but he did do the Joaquin Phoenix-starring Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, as well as the latest outing in the Indiana Jones franchise, so let’s just say my expectations are tempered. A Complete Unknown will cover Dylan’s life from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961, up until his fateful motorcycle crash in 1966. I’m sure most the events depicted in I’m Not There will be present, but I just don’t see how they could be shown in a way nearly as interesting as Haynes’s film. Bob Dylan apparently contributed to the script, which is a real blessing and a curse. He’s spoken highly of I’m Not There, so we can only wonder if he might try and infuse a little creativity into the film. Or not. He’s got better things to do.
It’s a cliche to say that the music biopic is one of the most formulaic of genres, but it’s really absurd how similar they all feel. You have a childhood tragedy, a sudden rise to stardom, then pressure gets to be too much, they develop an addiction to drugs, possibly they spend some time in rehab, and depending on whether or not they’re still alive, it’ll end with some text informing the viewer what happened after. These cradle to the grave stories are obviously the artist’s real life, but what do they actually tell us about the subject that reading their Wikipedia page while blasting a greatest hits compilation couldn't give you?
You would think Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, an absurdist and very funny parody of the genre, would have destroyed the form in the same way Blazing Saddles did for the Western, or least encouraged directors to find a different approach, but no, they persist, and are seemingly just as popular as ever. Elvis, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Rocketman were all massive hits, and racked up gold during the awards season. Just last year, the trailers for the Bob Marley biopic One Love were unescapable anytime you went to the theater, and Bradley Cooper’s love letter to Lenny Bernstein Maestro created an unstoppable discourse tsunami because he kept claiming that Bernstein’s ghost visited him in his sleep and told him he was a good boy. And still on the horizon are an Amy Winehouse biopic, a Michael Jackson biopic (which promises to portray the man in an unambiguously positive light), and Sam Mendes’s latest ill-advised vanity project of 4 simultaneous Beatles biopics. Surely, something has got to give eventually. But until then, we’ll always have I’m Not There as a balm for the soul.
