Once in a very long while a film explodes onto the screen and rewrites all the certainties of its medium. When it happens, chances are, you’re watching a movie by Todd Haynes. An audacious and impressively mutable directing talent, Mr. Haynes has given us a wondrously discombobulating portrait of the ‘worried well’ (Safe) and a marvellous Karen Carpenter biopic re-enacted with Barbie dolls (Superstar). He has deconstructed the tropes of queer cinema with a nod to the paranoid sci-fi of the ’50s (Poison) and plundered the Sirkian melodrama with the superlative Far From Heaven.

I’m Not There, Mr. Haynes’ latest picture is, however, a real doozy even by his iconoclastic standards. An unlikely and spectacular delve into the life and times of one Bob Dylan, the film is a perfect collision between two of the world’s most archly mercurial artists, its director and subject. It is not, however, a particularly obvious career choice for a filmmaker who emerged from the radical queer cinema of the ’80s.
“I know but that was part of the appeal,” says Haynes. “I like keeping people on their toes. I like that I arrived at Dylan myself and thought maybe I need to take a second look at this guy. But if you’re a woman Dylanologist or a gay Dylanologist there comes a point when you have to explain how and why. Just by being yourself you pose a challenge to a kind of white male heterosexual dominance or orthodoxy, a kind of ownership if you like. And he himself is a challenge to that. It’s impossible to affirm your own identity through him in the normal way that hero-worship or fandom works. That process can only fall apart completely. Dylan will not confirm anyone’s identity. He will appear in front of your eyes but when you try to grab hold of him, he’ll fly away.”
Todd Haynes was in the process of moving from New York to Portland, Oregon when it all started. Having adopted Bob Dylan’s ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ as the official anthem of his uprooting, he suddenly found he wanted nothing more than to dive into the entire Bob Dylan back catalogue.
“As a young man I had been a huge Dylan fan but it had been twenty years since I listened to Dylan with that kind of intensity,” he tells me. “I’d reached a point in my life when I wanted to get away from everything and just be in an empty house that my sister knew about. For some reason I found myself drawn to Dylan more than I had been since my high school years. I suppose there were a bunch of triggers around that time. Everybody I knew was reading Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic around then. And I became obsessed. I started reading all the biographies I could find and buying up the albums that came out during years when I’d not been paying attention. I devoured the collected interviews from ’65 and ’66 including the Playboy interview. The texts he was cooking up for these journalists were almost philosophical. I knew they needed to be dramatised and shared and experienced for all their humour and drama and poetry.”
But how? Robert Zimmerman, as even minor Dylanologists know, is impossible to pin down. Even his earliest incarnation as the darling of the New York folk scene is anything but straightforward. A Jewish teenager who grew up in Eisenhower-era Minnesota and borrowed a name from a Welsh poet and the manner of Dust Bowl troubadour, it was merely the springboard for series of contradictions and paradoxes we know as Bob Dylan.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted,” admits Haynes. “It become like a war I had to go back to. But I was really charged. I was charged by this return to Dylan’s music. When I started writing Far From Heaven I started overdosing everyday. And I was charged by my new home in Portland. Suddenly I was meeting hundreds of creative people who are all, of course, far younger than me. So I was in this environment that’s humming with creativity.”
A fired-up Haynes decided there was little point in attempting to reconcile all the splintered personas of Dylan. The only satisfactory way to represent Bob Dylan, he thought, was to embrace all the uncertainties.
“He’s a constant chameleon,” proffers Haynes. “He’s a shape shifter. Even when he makes absolute statements of one kind or another, somewhere along the line you’ll learn he’s done with that. Instability is the key to understanding.”
Haynes’ daringly unconventional biopic presents us with not one but six Bob Dylans. There’s Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), a young black boy who takes to the American road with a guitar and an entirely anachronistic line of hobo nonsense. Arthur (Ben Whishaw) is Dylan as Rimbaud. Next comes Jack (Christian Bale), an earnest, blue-shirt folkie with a deep commitment to social causes who later converts to Christianity. Jack seems to spawn Robbie (Heath Ledger), a bohemian actor whose life and marriage unravels in the glare of celebrity. Jude (Cate Blanchett) is easily recognised as the cocksure Dylan of Don’t Look Back, a jester holding court for the glitterati of the day. Finally, we meet Billy (Richard Gere), a mysterious outlaw holed up in what looks like a western re-imagined by Fellini.
“When I look at all the actors now and think how each is poignant and unique. I settled on six characters. I decided not to drive myself crazy looking at other trends and traits that they didn’t embody once I had decided what each of them should be. I did think that the Billy story almost includes so much stuff it’s hard to pin it down. He embodies Dylan’s love of country and his love of American folklore. It points back in time to The Basement Tapes in particular but also forward to his most recent album. It’s a lot of baggage but Richard carried it all.”
Mr. Gere is, of course, a closer physical approximation of Dylan than his co-stars Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin. But there is method in Haynes’ casting madness.
“For the character of Jude I wanted it to be a conceptual piece of casting,” he explains. “I needed the shock of Cate to reinvigorate this very, very famous and over determined moment in Dylan’s life. She eventually disappears into the role just as Dylan did. Marcus doesn’t disappear and he’s not meant to. He’s always meant to be a kind of visual joke about Dylan channelling Woody Guthrie and being out of step and time.”
I’m Not There proved inspired enough for Dylan to give his blessing and the rights to the back catalogue.
“It was really easy,” says Haynes. “I still can’t believe how direct and simple it was. I wrote out a one-sheet description to Dylan and sent it to him with one of my DVDs. Then I got a call from his people. He said ‘Let’s give the guy the rights’ and that was that.”
A singular, visionary filmmaker, Haynes has been described by his casting director Laura Rosenthal as “the nicest control freak in the world.” Happily, Dylan was perfectly contented to let the director work without any stipulations or interference.
“I haven’t dealt with him directly at all. The closest dealing I’ve had with Dylan is actually with Jeff Rosen and he’s been extremely courteous and generous throughout the entire process. This was the script that I committed to and nobody ever said you can’t have this and you can’t have that. The only thing that came up at one discussion was – and it wasn’t in response to anything in the script, it just came up in conservation – was that he didn’t want the film to be preoccupied with drug use. But the way it was said, you couldn’t even describe it as a demand.”
Dylanologists everywhere should be thrilled with the results, particularly when you factor in a tremendous soundtrack.
“There’s a lot of classic Dylan,” enthuses Haynes. “I wanted those singular masterpieces like ‘Visions Of Johanna’. We had some of the most incredible versions of songs that didn’t make it into the film but thankfully they’ve found their place on the soundtrack.
But I also wanted to bring songs that were far lesser known into the spotlight. I was really glad we made special use of some of the minor Christian songs like ‘Pressing On’. There’s nothing more exciting than uncovering a lost Dylan.”
Spoken like a true Dylanologist.

I’m Not There is released December 23