Metrograph

Like a true Bob Dylan fan, Haynes understood that no paint-by-numbers biopic would capture Dylan’s wily, elusive, trickster spirit, and so in anti-biopic I’m Not There he gives us, quite literally, a multitude of shifting Dylan surrogates. In Haynes’s hall of mirrors film, “Dylan”—mentioned by name only in an opening title card—is variously reincarnated as a preadolescent Black folk singer who calls himself “Woody Guthrie,” a Greenwich Village folkie (Christian Bale), and the actor hired to play that same folkie in a film (Heath Ledger); a Wild West outlaw gone into hiding (Richard Gere); and a former protest singer hero alienating fans with electric guitar while careening towards self-destruction (Cate Blanchett, in one of her signature roles).

Pre-screening conversation with co-founders Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler on the 30 years of Killer Films, moderated by filmmaker Kent Jones, on Saturday, August 2nd.

Distributor: Lionsgate