The discharge of A Full Unknown on Christmas Day introduced the legend of Bob Dylan to a brand new era, starring one of many period’s most beloved actors, Timothée Chalamet, because the perennial American icon. For some, it is likely to be their first publicity to the legendary artist; for others, it is likely to be a brand new telling of a narrative that they already know by coronary heart. However whereas A Full Unknown is likely to be the primary movie centered solely on Dylan’s early years, it is not the primary movie to discover what makes him such a legendary determine in popular culture.
There have been documentaries like Martin Scorsese’s complete No Route House from 2005, or D.A. Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall take a look at Dylan’s 1965 U.Ok. tour Do not Look Again, all of which seize one thing of the artist, however by no means an entire image. For an artist as notoriously slippery as Bob Dylan, probably no single movie may fully distill his essence for the display screen. However one movie most likely comes closest to capturing the spirit of its topic, and does so in a really unconventional method: Todd Haynes’s I am Not There.
- Launch Date
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October 1, 2007
- Runtime
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135 minutes
How ‘I am Not There’ Explores the Legend of Bob Dylan
Launched in 2007, I am Not There explores the various aspects of Dylan’s life and artistry, however not by a traditional music biopic. As a substitute, Haynes makes use of six totally different actors who every play a special character based mostly on some a part of Dylan’s public persona. There’s Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, a well-known protest singer who flees the limelight and resurfaces years later as a born-again Christian, combining Dylan’s reluctant “voice of a era” early years and his weird dalliance with Christianity within the ’70s and ’80s. Heath Ledger (within the final movie launched earlier than his loss of life) performs Robbie Clark, a younger actor who turns into well-known for enjoying Rollins in a film based mostly on his life, the celebrity estranging him from his artist spouse Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and his children.
Marcus Carl Franklin performs a younger vagabond going by the identify Woody Guthrie, adopting a Melancholy-era itinerant life-style nicely into the Nineteen Sixties, reflecting Dylan’s personal early Mud-Bowl affectations. Richard Gere performs an getting older Billy the Child, dwelling a secluded life till modernity comes knocking on his door, representing Dylan’s late-’60s Americana explorations and probably his extra secluded later years. Appearing as a type of meta-commentary on the motion, Ben Whishaw performs a model of the nineteenth Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, one among Dylan’s greatest influences, anachronistically seated earlier than some type of authorities interrogation panel.
Simply the movie’s most celebrated efficiency, nonetheless, comes from Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, a wiry, sunglasses-sporting avatar of Dylan’s bratty, amphetamine-fueled mid-’60s period, after he’d left the people scene behind and upset a lot of his longtime followers. Moreover Bale’s, Blanchett’s character might be the closest to an precise portrayal of Dylan, and her efficiency drew the film’s greatest acclaim, netting her an Academy Award nomination for greatest supporting actress and successful a Golden Globe.
By exploring Dylan’s life and profession in a extra summary, symbolic method, Haynes acknowledges {that a} determine as mercurial as Dylan, with as many distinct evolutions, may by no means be approached in a extra conventional kind, and any try to take action could be far too limiting. Whereas A Full Unknown makes an attempt to seize some model of Dylan as a flesh-and-blood man, I am Not There focuses on Dylan as an icon, exploring the methods he exists within the public creativeness.
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‘I am Not There’ as Cinema
Whereas it is clearly in dialog with Dylan’s life and profession, I am Not There can be in dialog with the type of cinema itself. Haynes makes use of totally different cinematic kinds for every character, drawing from the music documentary kind for the Jack Rollins phase, ’60s French and Italian New Wave for the story of Jude Quinn, ’70s New Hollywood for Billy the Child, and past. This sense of formal experimentation displays the contradictions and shifts in perspective inherent in its topic. Nobody movie can seize the essence of Dylan, so Haynes basically makes six totally different movies in a single.
The strains between the tales start to blur because the movie goes on, with characters crossing the boundaries of time and area and infrequently showing in different tales altogether. In direction of the tip, Billy the Child encounters Woody dressed as Charlie Chaplin, and later rides at the back of a contemporary automotive. Haynes additionally blurs these strains by double-casting sure actors; for one, Bruce Greenwood performs each a British journalist who interviews Jude Quinn, and Billy the Child’s rival, the lawman Pat Garrett. All this self-conscious artifice speaks to the general public picture of Dylan, who has all the time stored the general public at a distance by deliberate obfuscation.
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I am Not There is way from a simple telling of Dylan’s life, however it’s in the end the one movie that has managed to seize one thing approaching his spirit on the display screen. A Full Unknown would possibly purport to be a extra grounded take a look at Dylan as an actual particular person, however it’s in the end as a lot about mythmaking as I am Not There, as awestruck admirers watch Dylan reverently with the sense that they are watching vital historical past unfolding. Haynes’s movie acknowledges that Bob Dylan is just too unconventional a topic to be approached in a traditional method, and it captures the essence of its topic higher than some other movie. Anybody who needs to discover extra of Dylan after watching A Full Unknown ought to make it some extent to test it out.