I'm Not There!!!!

Normal biopics tell you all information they can gather about the person in at least 90 minutes and you leave the film's enviroment sure that you know a lot and enough about that artist's life and work. The last three ones I can recall have watched [Ray, Walk The Line and La Vie En Rose], despite different from one another, are exactly like that and I could say that biopics, particularly if they are from music business personalities, were not my thing.

Until the moment my eyes and mind layed on 2007's Todd Haynes's effort: I'm Not There. Whenever I think of it I still feel the overwhelming feeling of being thrown into a world I know nothing about, and worst, had left it knowing even less!!

I'll explain: when I saw "Ray" and "La Vie En Rose", I already worshiped Ray Charles's and Edith Piaf's music and had little info on their lives, and when I saw "Walk The Line" I knew nothing about Johnny Cash [except that he had died recently and had covered a 9 Inch Nails song] and June Carter, but when the films ended I didn't feel a pinch of urge to read more and to know other points of view over their lives stories, the only thing I did was to download "Walk The Line"'s soundtrack, since I knew nothing about Cash, still I downloaded Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon reinterpreting the Cashes' songs.

When "I'm Not There" was through I was totally speechless, because I din't know what to make out of it! The only thing I knew is that I wanted oh so badly to download every Dylan album I could find. I felt that instead of telling us tales of Dylan's lives with the supposed certainty that they are facts, Haynes's film feels more like his feelings and thoughts about Dylan's work than reenactment of his life's stories. That way I'm sure I have to watch this movies a million times more, as I study and find out more about Dylan's work from the Dylan himself.

But as the thoughts remain I wonder if that's not the best way of biopic-ing an artist? Through his or her works; unless the artist himself writes the screenplay, but that would be a dang of a Norma Desmond thing to do.

In the opening credits you can read the "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan", and for me that's where the thing takes the genius form, because it's not based on anything like a specific biography.

And inspired is way more including than based; you might say they end up being the same thing, but if you pay attention closely to the words and their many layers, you'll notice the difference between them.

In the end, "I'm Not There" does feel like no one is there! You know it's Dylan they're talking about, but is it really? The film presents a raw honesty that those are the views of Haynes's over Dylan's work and that's why [in my conception] the film is so intriguing, demandind and [why not] inspiring.

From now on I have the two missions of discovering Dylan and Haynes.

[Song: Lenda - CéU]