I’ve said for a long time that I think Dylan agreed to cooperate with Todd Haynes and his unconventional biopic “I’m Not There” because he knew that nothing in a film like this could ever really stick to him. Richard Gere says it in another way:

“There is no Dylan in it,” Gere told me a couple days ago. And that reason, for one, is why the icon will like it, Gere believes. “I think he’ll like it because it’s not attempting to be him. It’s a fever dream. I think that’s probably the only way you could tell the story of an artist that extraordinary.”

Meanwhile, the movie is premiering at the Venice Film Festival, and the director is out there talking about it, and he agrees with RWB too.

“I’m Not There,” a biopic of folk icon Bob Dylan in which he is conspicuously absent but omnipresent, should “wash over you like a dream”, the film’s director Todd Haynes said Tuesday.

Viewers should not “get too bogged down in the literal connections to Dylan and let it take you somewhere”, Haynes told reporters of his ambitious work that channels Dylan through seven characters and premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

“Let it wash over you and sort of take you like a dream,” he said.

[...]

“This is the first dramatic film (Dylan) has permitted anyone to do on his life,” Haynes said, attributing the honour to the film’s “open structure, something that will keep expanding rather than reducing his life” to a finite story.

The song “I’m Not There” is a “beautiful kind of perfect way to describe this film”, Haynes said. “Every time you try to touch him he’s not there.”

He ain’t there alright. But I find myself beginning to look forward quite a bit to seeing the picture.

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