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the duality of dylan

In viewing this film, one might ask, “At what point does this Fellini-esque picture become pretentiously abstract?” That’s debatable, but writer/director Todd Haynes shot this strange movie with the approval of Bob Dylan, using his recorded music, which gives one a hint that it faults on the side of arty excess. Nonetheless, being a Dylan fan, I’m willing to give Haynes the benefit of the doubt and embrace his surrealistic fantasy.
Haynes uses dreamlike imagery to present a fictional account of Dylan’s life using six different actors, all playing various stages of Dylan’s incarnations– from a young Woody Guthrie, played by a 12-year old black boy, to Dylan’s androgynous period, depicted in the stark black & white of the early documentary Don’t Look Back.
Incredibly, Cate Blanchett portrays Dylan during this phase of his career. For two seconds viewers see a flash of Blanchett, then she nails Dylan’s schizophrenic demeanor. Indeed, Blanchett completely absorbs Dylan’s psyche. It is a cinematic method acting coup d’etat.
In keeping with Dylan’s put-on humor, Haynes uses a cavalcade of arty styles, shifting back in forth in time with an array of distorted characters, a la Fellini. The presentation is disconnected without a central core. In other words, it doesn’t make logical sense, but by design, Haynes was looking inside Dylan’s mind as if Dylan himself was dreaming these sequences in an astral world in which just thinking it makes it happen.
Clearly, Haynes took a daring approach to Dylan’s warped biography by having a 12-year old black boy play a Woody Guthrie-idolizing Dylan. Dylan’s other named personalities include Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, the mid-career Dylan who finds Jesus and becomes a preacher. Heath Ledger plays the movie star Dylan, Robbie Clark, who seems to be a tangent to the story. It was sad to see Ledger on-screen so soon after his tragic death. Clark stars in a film called Grain of Sand, which features Alice Fabian (Julienne Moore) narrating Robbie’s complicated involvement with French painter Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg).
Dylan is the emaciated and loopy Jude during the famous Newport Folk Festival debacle. This is the period in his career when he presented his backup group, The Band, and went electric, launching material from Highway 61 Revisited. The folk purist audience booed and rioted at his audacity for going electric. At the end of this bizarre show, Dylan and The Band gun-down the crowd with Tommy guns; a wish-fulfillment fantasy pulled directly from Dylan’s dreams.
In homage to D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Lester, Haynes pulls off A Hard Days Night sequence with Beatles look-alikes. By this time, Jude is exhausted and burned out. His pursuit of the ditzy blonde Coco (Michelle Williams) is mocked in a psychedelic party scene. Of course, his infamous “motorcycle accident,” is seen in this film as an excuse to get the much maligned troubadour into rehab before he died of a multitude of excesses.
Bruce Greenwood plays a snobby journalist from a London rag who is continually trying to attach philosophical and political significance to Jude’s musings. Jude is always putting him on with curt answers. “Look man, I’m a storyteller, not a folk singer or poet,” trying to dispel this jerk’s intellectual ruminations that somehow Jude (Dylan) is a prophet.
Suddenly, the film shifts back in time with Richard Gere playing Billy the Kid, reminiscent of Dylan’s role in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. This is the strangest sequence to understand, since it mixes Pechinpah’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller with Billy the Kid. It jumps in time showing Billy riding in a limo. Like I said, it’s happening in dream reality where anything can happen in any time frame.
Unquestionably, Dylan’s approval of Haynes magical mystery tour of his distorted dream reality gives Dylanphiles full acceptance of Haynes’ scattershot pretension and freewheeling use of obscure cinematic techniques to convey this fantasy. In a limo right out of one of Dylan’s past documentaries, Jude levels with his inquisitor about his music being stories from his dreams and fantasies. He uses the music that fits his vision of the song, which could be in any genre. Amen– fade to black!