With mainstream accessibility close to zero, this movie is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. It has a great soundtrack, some good acting and good cinematography. The lack of traditional narrative structure gets tiring, but there are plenty to see in this film. Just keep your eyes and ears open.
It's incredibly original and ambitious and its love for the source figure shines through, but although I was aware of the fact that it was six actors playing Dylan going in, I wasn't aware that it was almost completely structureless. An extremely well-intentioned yet complete mess. And yes, Cate Blanchett was excellent.
Part of the slippery brilliance is that even the film's shortcomings bolster the thesis of Haynes: Bob Dylan is elusive and inscrutable, a chameleon that changes his inner workings along with his skin. The fact that the film sometimes lacks cohesion is, in fact, its very point. Haynes has made a film that is a reflection of its subject rather than a depiction. It is a big, grand, willfully confusing, galloping parade--a public life restructured as an epic poem written by an absurdist.
Here's my problem with I'm Not There: it makes no fucking sense. And that is to say, I'm sure in some way I could figure it out, but it's already uninteresting enough, I don't even care to put the puzzle together. Or does it not even take a Lynch-like approach, does it rather just take some random images and shuffle them to make an incoherent mess? Which is supposed to perfectly capture Bob Dylan and therefore be a stroke of genius. Bull. ...Blanchett is fantastic, though.
I think too many people wanted this to be a straight-forward biographical film, no one expected it to be art-house style. For the most part it's pretty good. I liked all the actors playing Dylan, especially Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale. But Richard Gere's part was...just too weird...and to me, made the rest of the film suffer.
This is a bold film to make and it's not one that will work with everyone, but I loved I'm Not There. It's very experimental, but Haynes uses Dylan as an example to paint everyone as a person.
I love Bob Dylan, and I liked most of the actors in here (one of Heath Ledger's last roles) so I was anticipating this film majorly. Sometimes it's a little too pretentious for it's own good, but it's still a great flick. Cate Blanchett's performance steals the show.
really disappointing, blanchett was NOT GOOD and her parts were poor, surface-level imitations that brought nothing to the source material, anyone who knows dylan should cringe at this film, except for the Malibu/McQueen aspect and the potential for the Old Weird America / Gere sequences