I’m Not There

Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven) explodes the traditional bio-pic in this film about the life of Bob Dylan. Here multiple actors -- including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett and an African-American pre-teen -- play the many-faceted rock star as Haynes depicts a one-of-a-kind genius who has reinvented himself many times. Also starring Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, David Cross and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

An Independent Spirit Award nominee for Best Feature, Director and Supporting Female Actor (Blanchett), Supporting Male Actor (Marcus Carl Franklin) and the Robert Altman Award for Best Ensemble Cast.

Cate Blanchett is a 2008 Golden Globe winner for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in this film.

“A feast for the eyes, the ears and the Dylanologist scratching around our minds and hearts.” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone)

“Among its many achievements, Mr. Haynes’s film hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory, exploding the literal-minded, anti-intellectual assumptions that guide even the most admiring cinematic explorations of artists’ lives. Rather than turn out yet another dutiful, linear chronicle of childhood trauma and grown-up substance abuse, Mr. Haynes has produced a dizzying palimpsest of images and styles, in which his subject appears in the form of six different people...adding up to an experience that is as fascinating and inexhaustible as listening to Blood on the Tracks or The Basement Tapes...it is unusual to see a masterwork emerge from one artist’s absorption with the work of another...the imagination unleashed.” (A.O. Scott, New York Times)

“Dynamic, polymorphous...I’m Not There turns out to be a triumph of intellect and cinematic imagination that feels light rather than heavy, and such a novel approach to film biography as to leave every Ray and Walk the Line looking especially clueless. Haynes pulls off the seemingly impossible — he takes one of the most discussed, written-about, imitated, lusted-after public figures of the 20th century and shows us not something new, but something deeper. Indeed, the Bob Dylan whose “music and many lives” are the credited inspiration for Haynes’ film isn’t the mere mortal who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, found his way to New York at the dawn of the ’60s folk boom, and whose songs formed the soundtrack to the last great hurrah of American counterculture. He’s another kind of being — a pop star-child hurtling through the cosmos beneath our immortalizing gaze.” (Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly)