I'm Not There Review

Casting six actors as a single man could have been a stunt, and in the Richard Gere stretch it is one. Gere's Billy the Kid drifts around a dressed-up frontier town while the film waits for something to happen, and the last act sags under it. Everything surrounding that section is alive. Cate Blanchett plays the 1966 Jude Quinn as a wired, chain-smoking creature metabolising his own fame, and Edward Lachman shoots her in a blown-out black and white that quotes Fellini without merely copying him.

Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg carry the divorce material with a quiet hurt the rest of the film has no patience for. Christian Bale gets the least showy assignment, the protest singer Jack Rollins and later the born-again Pastor John, and he plays both as a man performing sincerity for a room, which is the sharpest single idea anyone has about Dylan here.

Todd Haynes trusts an audience to hold six registers at once, and the cutting keeps the associations loose rather than explanatory. The music cues do heavy lifting the script keeps avoiding, though, and a viewer who does not already know the records will spend two hours stranded outside a private joke.