'I'm Not There' tries to bring Dylan home

No one should go to "I'm Not There," writer/director Todd Haynes' new film, which he describes as "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," expecting to learn how Dylan came up with "Like a Rolling Stone," or what the real deal was with him and Edie Sedgwick. That's not there.

What is there is an experimental film -- or maybe conservatively experimental is more appropriate, since this one doesn't take a Ph.D. in Film Theory to follow -- that will delight, amuse and intrigue any Dylan lover. But it holds its audience, even those most intent on "getting it," at a distance. While this is not an un-Dylan-like approach, it makes it hard to lose yourself in the film.

I loved it as I might love a museum exhibit: politely, admiringly and with the slight nagging sensation that my cultural immersion would be, in the end, more fleeting than it "ought" to be.

That's in large part because there are six versions of Dylan on display, each representing a different phase of the musician's life. Christian Bale is Jack, the folk-singer Dylan (none are actually called Bob). As Robbie, Heath Ledger takes on the rock-star Dylan, along with his long romance with and marriage to an artist (a touching Charlotte Gainsbourg).

An 11-year-old African-American child named Marcus Carl Franklin represents the Dylan who aspired to become Jack. He tells lots of fibs and goes by the name Woody Guthrie, which is hilarious, especially when you consider that Bob Dylan actually gave the go-ahead to "I'm Not There," the first time he's ever allowed a dramatic film to be made about him and his music.

The biggest acting glory in "I'm Not There" goes to Cate Blanchett, who plays Jude, the newly electric Dylan. She both transcends the weirdness of the film and, hands down, is the most like Dylan, despite what could have been the paralyzing handicap of her beauty. You hang on her every witty word and movement, as you might have on Dylan's, certain it means something extraordinarily deep (even when it doesn't).

These Jude segments are such Fellini-esque eye candy that all that comes after them is visually disappointing. But those other scenes are also something of an emotional imposition; Blanchett is so in tune with Dylan that the other performers suffer in comparison. Richard Gere, as the last of Haynes' Dylans, a backwoods rambler named Billy the Kid, fares the worst.

His onerous task is to suggest a Dylan still ready to live in the world today, but that iconic Dylan remains so slippery and contradictory that any "ending" is going to feel false.

But how do you end a wacky, loving little movie about Bob Dylan? I'd have rewound a scene or two, to a moment when Blanchett's Jude speaks directly to the camera for the last time, and then gives a slow smile. It's so secretive, yet inclusive, that my eyes stung with tears at the rightness -- the Dylan-ness -- of it.