Film

I'm Not There

Name: I'm Not There
Genre: Drama, Music
Released: 2007
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger

Todd Haynes splits Bob Dylan into six people played by six actors — a boy hobo, a movie star, a gospel preacher, a wired-up electric hellraiser — and refuses to reconcile them. It's less biopic than seance, more interested in myth than fact. Gorgeous, maddening, and built for people who don't need their legends explained.

TMDb rating

6.5

If you liked this

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Haynes' earlier glam-rock fantasia does the same trick with a fictional Bowie-esque star, all mirrors and masks and unstable identity. If I'm Not There worked for you, this is the same brain, younger and hornier.

But Even more oblique than the Dylan film, with a plot that's basically a dare. Style over coherence, deliberately.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan2005no page yet

Scorsese's documentary is the ground truth Haynes is riffing against — real interviews, real archive, the actual young Dylan being cagey and brilliant on camera. Watch it to see how much of the myth was already self-authored.

But Straightforward talking-heads doc structure, three-plus hours, and no interest in the showmanship that makes the fiction version fun.

Love & Mercy2015

Brian Wilson played by two different actors at two different points of collapse and recovery, cutting between them rather than smoothing the join. Same instinct as Haynes — a life isn't one performance, it's several.

But More conventional and more devastating; if you want formal daring rather than emotional wallop, this plays it straighter.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Citizen Kane1941

Both refuse a single true version of a famous man, building him instead from mismatched fragments told by unreliable narrators — Haynes just swapped the newsreel structure for six actors.

The original fractured-biography movie: a dead magnate reconstructed through five contradictory witnesses, none of whom agree, all of whom are partly right. Haynes' six Dylans are direct descendants of this one unsolvable man.

But Black-and-white studio-era pacing and a reporter framing device that feels quaint next to Haynes' looser, wilder editing.

Walk the Line2005

The biopic I'm Not There is quietly arguing against — linear, redemptive, one actor, one Johnny Cash. Worth seeing precisely because it's everything Haynes refused to do, and does it well.

But Conventional to a fault if you came to Dylan's film hungry for more fragmentation. This is comfort food by comparison.

Control2007no page yet

Ian Curtis's short, doomed run with Joy Division, shot in stark monochrome that mirrors the band's own bleakness. A music biopic that trusts silence and stillness over spectacle.

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Inside Llewyn Davis2013

The Coens' vision of the Greenwich Village folk scene Dylan was about to blow up, seen from the perspective of a talented nobody going nowhere. Funny, cold, and gorgeous to look at.

But Deliberately circular and unresolved — if you need a character to grow or win something, this will frustrate you.

A Complete Unknown2024no page yet

The single-actor, single-timeline Dylan biopic, made as if Haynes had never happened. Useful as a control group: same subject, opposite method, and Chalamet is genuinely good.

But Plays it safe where the source material was anything but — a tidy story about a man who spent his life resisting tidiness.

Rocketman2019

Elton John's life told as literal fantasy sequence, songs breaking into full musical numbers mid-scene. Less cerebral than Haynes' approach but working the same idea — that myth-making is the more honest biography.

But Broader, campier, more crowd-pleasing — the fragmentation here is decorative rather than structural.

Far from Heaven2002

Haynes again, this time in full 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama mode, using an old genre's artifice to smuggle in something painfully real. See what he does when the mask is a decade instead of a person.

But No music, no Dylan, and a completely different register — pure heartbreak, no puzzle-box structure to chase.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story2007

Same genre engine — a musician remade across eras, played (mostly) by one increasingly unrecognisable actor — run through a comedy funhouse mirror instead of a serious one.

A gleefully stupid parody of every music biopic cliché — including, pointedly, the kind of self-serious multi-era reinvention story I'm Not There is doing for real. John C. Reilly is enormous fun.

But Broad, silly, occasionally juvenile comedy — the opposite of solemn arthouse ambition, on purpose.

Cobain: Montage of Heck2015

Another musician who resisted being one fixed person, reconstructed here through mixed media and animation instead of actors — same fragmentation, opposite register: documentary intimacy instead of movie-star mythology.

A documentary built from home movies, animation, journal pages and audio diaries rather than talking heads, trying to assemble a real musician's fractured self from the inside. Haynes' idea, done as nonfiction collage.

But Raw and often upsetting rather than playful — this is grief with the myth-making stripped away, not a puzzle to enjoy.