I'm Not There: Before Timothée Chalamet, Bob Dylan was played by Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger…

The funny biopic by Todd Haynes returns to television this weekend. Precisely Saturday evening on France 4.

We hear a lot about Bob Dylan lately with the filming ofA Complete Unknownfilm of James Mangold (Logan, Le Mans 66…), seen in the streets of New York. For this biopic recounting his early career in the 1960s, the filmmaker called on Timothée Chalametwho actually shares some air of resemblance with the interpreter of “Blowin' in the Wind”.

In 2007, Todd Haynes had also produced a biopic of the composer and performer, starting from an original idea: asking six actors of different genders, ages and skin colors to interpret Dylan. Or rather, an idea from Dylan, Christian Bale embodying for example the folk and protest Dylan, Cate Blanchett being the Dylan abandoning this musical style for the electric guitar, Marcus Carl Franklin interpreting a young and very fantasized (false?) version of the artist, Richard Gere being his alter-ego from 1973, when he starred in the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Heath Ledger his version “romantic”during his 11 years of marriage to Sara Lownds (who looks like Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Ben Whishaw embodying his public face from the 1960s, directly inspired by his most famous interviews.

A curiosity that had conquered FirstOlivier de Bruyn writing in our pages:

“The composition of the cast is not the only audacity of the film. What is this thing? A formal kaleidoscope? A radical impressionist attempt? There is that. And so much more. I'm Not There testifies to an inspiration in accordance with the metamorphoses of its hero. Juggle the timeline. The direction invents as much as the script, sublimates the desolate American landscapes with aerial tracking shots, penetrates without intrusive the mind of its model and thus subtly refers to his creative universe.

Fluctuatewho was then a partner in the editorial team, was equally won over by this film with its undeniable originality:

“I'm Not There is a film with and without Bob Dylan. A film that speaks to us above all about music, dreams, love and betrayal. A film about reflections, those of a man but above all of an era and a country, the United States, crossed by these songs like lightning that still burns today. A dreamlike and wildly free film. A wonder.

Bob Dylan is undoubtedly one of the most deliberately mysterious artists of the 20th century, having devoted a lot of energy to creating a character, or rather characters – returning David Bowie to the ranks of amateurs. Bob Dylan does not exist, a stage name invented by Robert Zimmerman who, definitively, “is not there”. Vampire of American popular culture, as of its most elitist and arty authors, he is nevertheless this being who links together the committed and idealistic folk singer of 20 years, the mocking and cynical rock star and the New Born, converted to Catholicism late in life.

From what we know, from what we imagine, from what the words and songs have offered us about him, Todd Haynes has finally decided not to attempt the impossible synthesis, but to engage in a decomposition in six characters, six actors, six styles of direction. Six avenues that he invents to better confuse them, since there will never be any question of resolving the mystery here. So there is the little guy from the blues Woody G. (Marcus Carl Franklin), the committed folk singer John (Christian Bale), the cursed poet Arthur R. (Ben Whishaw), the inveterate flirt Robbie (Heath Ledger), the cynical rock star Jude (Cate Blanchett, most spectacularly) and runaway hermit Billy the Kid (Richard Gere).

hallucinated journey

Like characters from the Dylanian imagination, these incarnations (in Chromosome 3 by David Cronenberg) live their own lives, between western, musical documentary, surrealist delirium, linked together by virtuoso editing and above all, a compelling call to let yourself be carried away. If a certain logic is put in place to pass from one body to another, this I'm Not There works above all like a dream, with its branching scenario, its polymorphous hero, its incessant breaks in tone, its phantasmagorical scenes full of poetry.

If there is a filmmaker that we constantly think about, despite the different styles used by Haynes, it is Federico Fellini, and his nocturnal wandering of Eight and a halfto which he openly pays homage in his part “Jude/Blanchett”. Symbolic images (Dylan and his electric band literally strafing the crowd), hallucinated dream scenes (the song Mister Jones), brutal accelerations and cottony softness: Todd Haynes dares everything, the quote as well as the pure invention, the real historical detail like the condensation of facts.

And that's why I'm Not There is much more than a film about Dylan. Emancipated from the biopic genre, the film is inhabited by a madness that we thought had been lost in the early 1980s. Of course, we find at the turn of a scene some of the important encounters in the life of the artist: Joan Baez (very funny appearance of Julianne Moore as a post cool baba in her bourgeois interior for a rock documentary plan plan), Eddie Sedgwick, escaped from Andy Warhol's band and fell into Dylan's arms for a brief moment, filmed here as a walk fantasized and bucolic, Alan Ginsberg (very beautiful scene at the feet of Jesus), the Beatles (hilarious scene in fast motion where the 5 thieves roll on the ground like kids on helium)… Apparitions treated as such: ghostly and unreal.

Mirror effect

I'm Not There is therefore a hallucinatory journey in the footsteps of a figure who is both brilliant and absent, whose deep unity would be music. Blues, folk, pop, electric rock, gospel, all these genres carry within them a History of the United States disseminated in so many stories, taken up in the first person by Dylan. He will have crossed these genres as much as he will have been crossed by them. And this is what Todd Haynes, a great music connoisseur, has brilliantly transcribed here. In Dylan, and at the heart of the film, it is American culture that is at stake, closer to the people than to pop.

We are right in it, the hard core of this shattered story, through young Woody, a little black guy fascinated by the blues and haunted by the slave trade, who one day is reproached for not talking about his own time. . Through the working poverty described by the committed folk singer who succeeds him. Also through the Vietnam War, which crystallized a period of commitment and social struggles unique in the United States, which neither the Baba Cool movement nor Dylan's folk period would survive. A reflection of its time, the music dialogues with History, and sometimes produces this fascinating mirror effect which links together a single man and an entire generation which first recognizes itself, then gets lost, and hates it. Greil Marcus* is never far away. Todd Haynes borrows Dylanian attributes, and propels them at a frantic pace like so many free electrons in the American landscape. Reminding us in passing that music has this power, which it shares with cinema: it crystallizes precious moments in a friction and gives them incredible power.

*Read if you haven't already Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, the perfect complement to the film.”