Critics reviews

It may be Haynes’s most conceptually audacious movie, organized through a series of radical visual, narrative, and tonal shifts to capture and contextualize Dylan’s own carefully stage-managed mutability.

No technique is gratuitous, each contributes to the story, and the unconfined style keeps the film interesting and unpredictable... [I'm Not Here is] a quirky and ingenious masterpiece.

It divides the life and career of Bob Dylan into numerous segments played by everyone from an African-American child to a woman so that echoes of one life sound absurd in another. I'm Not There's replication of the day's standard documentary style and newsreel footage recalls Kane's "March of Time" pastiche, and the result is a film that begins with the assumption that the subject cannot be demystified and so rejects altogether everything from narrative to continuity in casting.

...Never create anything. It will be misinterpreted. It will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life. And it will never change." I'M NOT THERE is a gleeful explosion of this grumpy outlook; Dylan's entire public life is the raw material, but Haynes uses his own passions and fascinations to free both Dylan and viewer from the burden of ‘the truth,' and welcome them into a bigger world.

Cate Blanchett is the movie's jewel, and also its problem. It was great casting, and her eerily exact inhabiting of Dylan's mannerisms is an inspired alienation effect. Whenever she is not on screen, however, the voltage-level drops, and her presence has the unfortunate effect of making the male contribution look ordinary.

[Im Not There] restless and brilliant, annoying and self-satisfied in its intimacy with the subject (who wholeheartedly approved). It will infuriate with its longeurs and frankly baffling little gimmicks, and it drifts on too long. But there’s no doubting Haynes has succeeded in capturing a real sense of the strange figure who can claim to have changed America.

[Haynes] has created a dazzling hybrid. There’s an undeniable thrill to watching something so experimental and yet totally accessible to those of us who speak only layman’s Dylanese, and it’s Haynes’ warmest film yet. The thing is infused with love – not the slavish kind but a true-eyed tribute to the artist who belongs to nobody and everybody at once.

To call the film biographical is misleading. If anything, it's a speculative essay that uses Dylan to comment on his audience and the 60s in general. Haynes, a graduate of the semiotics department at Brown University, isn't really concerned with Dylan as an individual; rather he presents him as a cluster of signs and texts, spread across six characters embodying phases or distinct aspects of his early career.

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.

[I'm Not There adds up to] more than an art-house jukebox musical, certainly, but less than a musical bio-pic of the sort likely to be embraced by audiences who aren't already deeply familiar with the Dylan mythology.

I’m Not There is a fantasia, a tell-all, a biopic that’s all high points, a folk-rock essay, and a dream, all wrapped into one. It plays like the headiest musical ever made. Haynes... may be the only director alive who can stage a movie as a brain-tickling semiotic experiment and still pack every frame with flesh-and-blood passion.

By creating this kaleidoscope of Dylans, Haynes makes a portrait not of the singer but of our perceptions. There is a parallel in Oliver Stone's "JFK," which I think was intended not as a solution of the Kennedy assassination but as a record of our paranoia about it.... [Coming away from I'm Not There,] we have been left not one step closer to comprehending Bob Dylan, which is as it should be.