Starring: Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, and Ben Whishaw.

Directed by: Todd Haynes

Last night, I watched the movie “I’m Not There” on DVD for the first time.

Don’t get fooled by the advertisements of this film, although the film was advertised as a “Bob Dylan” biopic with many different actors playing Bob Dylan, it is NOT a biopic film. It is not really about Bob Dylan. None of the actors, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, etc play Bob Dylan. They all play 6 different characters that are incarnations of Bob Dylan. The six incarnations are: an actor, a folk singer, an electrified troubadour, Rimbaud, Billy the Kid, and Woody Guthrie.

The film is basically putting Bob Dylan’s lyrics from his songs to a live action motion picture. In other words taking Dylan’s stories from his songs and putting ’em all into film. Heath Ledger plays Robbie Clark an actor who falls for a woman and raises a family, gets married, later becomes a self centered jerk and then divorces his wife. Christian Bale plays musician Jack Rollins. Cate Blanchett’s character Jude Quinn a folk singer gets the most screen time in the film than any other character. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, and Ben Whishaw a child actor plays Arthur Rimbaud who is a folk protest singer trying to make it big in the music industry.

As far as my thoughts on the movie goes, I’m no Bob Dylan fan, but the reason I wanted to watch this was because it’s one of Heath Ledger’s last films before he died. I watched this film last night, and I would have to say that I really loved it, this really was an excellent film, creative film making and unique storytelling. The acting was perfect by the cast. There’s a lot of music played throughout this entire film since this is a film about music, folk music mostly. There’s mostly Bob Dylan songs played throughout this movie so it can go with the storyline of the film. Todd Haynes directing skills is pretty impressive. The film is a little over 2 hours long but the pacing goes by quick. Very touching and beautiful film all around. I would reccomend it. It was a good DVD blind buy.

Score for “I’m Not There”: **** (4 stars as in excellent)

Kev