I'm Not There: Critic Reviews

The singular haunting beauty of I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' thrilling deep-vision meditation on the music and many lives of Bob Dylan, is that obsession isn't just its fuel -- it's the movie's spirit and subject, its driving force.

Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.

A powerfully reverent exercise in remystification, an attempt to waft some of the clouds of glory back around the great man, clouds that might have dispersed in recent years.

Despite its inventive setup, it lacks a coherent narrative.

An absorbing, occasionally hallucinatory disquisition on how Dylan has brilliantly eluded his audience's projections.

I'm Not There feels like the most alive work to hit the screen in ages.

A vividly imagined homage to the evolving music and enigmatic figure we know as Bob Dylan.

I'm Not There would make a fine exercise for graduate school analysis. I'm just not sure how well it works as a movie.

I'm Not There is an uncompromising, beautifully wrought essay on identity, artistic and otherwise.

Todd Haynes has devised a Bob Dylan biopic that not even Dylan, for all his self-mythologizing, would have had the audacity to conceive.

It makes Yellow Submarine look like a miracle of sober narrative.

What Haynes does is take away the reassuring segues that argue everything flows and makes sense, and to show what's really chaos under the skin of the film.

I appreciate Haynes' craft and ambition. I love the Ledger/Gainsbourg scenes, which are sweet and sad and delicately shaded. And Blanchett's inspired not-quite-impersonation of Dylan is reason enough to tussle with the rest of it.

What emerges is a speculative, critical essay about the 60s, weighted down in spots by political correctness and a conflicted desire to mock Dylan's denseness while catering to his hardcore fans, but otherwise lively, fluid, and watchable.

I'm Not There is at once experimental and mainstream: Haynes juggles the facts, plays fast and loose, but serves up images, and songs that are as much a part of the collective pop consciousness as anything the 20th century produced.

Writer-director Todd Haynes has come up with the most interesting psycho-cultural-biographical mix in memory here, managing to make the film reek of the artsy '60s at the same time it unfailingly honors its subject.

I'm Not There is brilliant, if often brilliantly surreal, filmmaking.

I cannot believe this is the Todd Haynes who topped my ten-best list in 2002 with the magnificent, unforgettable Far From Heaven. Headed for the No. 1 spot on my ten-worst list, I'm Not There is a tumultuous disappointment.

Lacks a narrative and a center, much like the "ghost" at its core.

An exhilarant. Sends you out of the theater just as Dylan (and Rimbaud) would have it: with a riot of perfumes.

It doesn't all work and it runs too long. But every fragment of Dylan's life, every version of him, from the funny to the tippy, rings true.

How does it feeeel? Like a rolling shambles, much of it, and even a second viewing doesn't erase the sensation.

For Better or Worse, Todd Haynes' 'I'm Not There' Reinvents the Biopic Genre

To enjoy I'm Not There you should be just a little bit Dylan-crazy, fascinated by his talent, ornery personality and enduring cultural influence.

one of the most inventive and joyous movies of the year.