I'm Not There.

What Haynes has essentially done is create a film that is a Bob Dylan song, one of his best.

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

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.

A fascinating experiment that, if the viewer is willing to surrender to Haynes's sometimes hermetic meditations on Dylan's life, heartily rewards the investment.

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.

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

Anyone can make a bad movie, but it takes a good filmmaker to make one as bad as I'm Not There.

First things first; this is most definitely an 'art movie' and yes, it's pretty long. However if you have the ability to maintain your attention, this an enjoyable watch. It's pretty for one thing. And really very smart. I can't say I understood every detail. But the approach to the biography is well done. Bob Dylan is complex character (aren't we all?) who has had an extraordinary life. So we see a fragmented reality, each character an stand-in for different sides of the whole person, the truth residing somewhere within. The clue is in the title. A great soundtrack too ('natch')

It's got plenty of standout performances, such as like Cate Blanchett's utterly uncanny turn as "Jude Quinn," but "I'm Not There" is way too ambitious interpretive, oblique, and abstract to be construed as a coherent biography.

Let me preface my review by saying I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan. Love his music. Love his book. Love his style. He is iconic. I don't feel like this movie really captured Bob's spirit. I was really bored by it to be honest. It was creative, and I thought that Cate Blanchett totally knocked the ball out of the park, but it was just a drag to watch. They should have made a movie where Cate Blanchett played Bob for its entirety. The soundtrack is great, and I give the film points for Blanchett's stunning performance. The other actors weren't necessarily bad, they just didn't really speak to me as a Dylan fan . . .

The many faces & phases of Bob Dylan. It's painfully pretentious, gruellingly long & quite disjointed. It's saving graces, however, are great performances by Heath Ledger & Cate Blanchett & of course the fantastic music. The film though just didn't work for me at all.

Let's start at the beginning: I'm not a fan of Bob Dylan, nor have I ever wasted much time listening to his music. Despite this, I recognize the impact he had on music and the strength of many of his songs, later used and visited by other musicians. So much of this movie tells me very little. Still, I decided to see him, convinced by the number of notables involved. What this film does is basically tell stories alluding to the singer's life, personifying in fictional characters several aspects of his life and career. It's an innovative, brilliant idea, but I think it was poorly executed: the film is excessively long and slow, and if I didn't know the subject and had read something about the film beforehand, I would have a hard time understanding the narrative. This is intensified by the temporal and spatial leaps in the plot, which make it even more difficult to understand. Some plot segments didn't turn out as interesting or well-developed either. The cast is quite good, particularly Cate Blanchett. She gives us the best performance in the movie, and it's worth seeing the movie just to see how she untangles herself from the role in her hands. Christian Bale and Heath Ledger are also very good and Marcus Carl Franklin was able to surprise, in a work more mature than his age would suggest. Julianne Moore also looked pretty good to me, but she has little to add. Less interesting, the works of Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Charlotte Gainsbourg seem too raw and undeveloped. The rest, I confess, did not attract my attention in the least. Technically, the movie is a mess. Editing and editing seem lost in a maze of script pieces. The cinematography is excellent, as are the sets and different costumes used. There is no doubt that an effort was made to make the film artistically beautiful, and that was a very successful effort. The soundtrack features several Dylan songs, something that seems mandatory since the film was about him.