I’m Not There is a brilliant, but flawed beautifully strange movie. As I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the life and work of Bob Dylan I cannot say whether it is an effective study of the man, I would suspect that if you were looking for that then Don’t Look Back or No Direction Home would suit your needs better.
All the six actors playing the part of ‘Dylan’ are wonderful although through no fault of his Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark seems the least Dylan-like. Of the supporting actors I think Bruce Greenwood deserves a lot of praise for his dual roles of Keenan Jones and Pat Garrett. It’s packed to the gills with references to or homages of other movies and references to the life and work of Bob Dylan himself of course although I think I probably missed far more of the latter. With the Richard Gere segment being heavily influenced by Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid it is appropriate that Kris Kristofferson be the narrator for the story.
My two main criticisms of the film are that there is almost no narrative flow between each of the segments, the film mostly just seems to cut between them at random and it seems unnecessarily long I don’t believe the film would suffer from having many of the scenes cut entirely.
