I'm Not There

The songs, lives (real and imagined) and mysteries of Bob Dylan provide the raw material for Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There." It's less a biography than an impressionistic survey of the artist, his art, his cultural impact and the mystery that still surrounds him. This is a freewheeling Bob Dylan portrait in which his name is never spoken and his life and career are represented by six actors representing various personas: Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the early folk-singer icon who burst from the coffee-house scene into the national spotlight; Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the electric, weird, wired-on-amphetamines Dylan who riffs and fidgets through interviews; an actor (Heath Ledger) who once played Jack Rollins in a biopic; an 11-year-old hobo (Marcus Carl Franklin) who spins tales of his past; an aging cowboy (Richard Gere) in a town populated by characters from Dylan songs; and a poet (Ben Whishaw) who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud. Faced with an artist defined more by his lyrics than his life story, Haynes delivers a song-cycle of a movie: vivid, exaggerated, contradictory impressions of a man who confounds a culture looking to peg him with a definition.

There is much history and myth and lyrical references to sift through in Haynes' narrative. The two-disc DVD set offers plenty of help. Haynes' dense commentary track dives into every scene with insight to its origins and inspirations and fills in around the edges with comments on the production (shot in Montreal) and a few notes on technical details. The 42-minute "A Conversation With Todd Haynes," drawn from numerous Haynes interviews and Q&A sessions, offers even more food for thought, while "Making the Soundtrack" explores the creation of the musical soundscape, which features a different voice for every incarnation. Other highlights include two brief deleted scenes (one with Blanchett, the other with Gere) and four alternate scenes, audition tapes for Marcus Carl Franklin and Ben Whishaw, a gallery of trailers that includes eight takes on Dylan's classic "Subterranean Homesick Blues" protest-music video, numerous on-screen essays about Dylan and the film, a reprint of Haynes' original one-page proposal to Dylan, pages of Haynes' storyboards and scene sketches, and a Dylan chronology, discography, filmography and bibliography. All this, and optional song-lyric subtitles too!