News via Rotten Tomatoes on the forthcoming Bob Dylan “biopic,” directed by Todd Haynes, called “I’m Not There.” Cate Blanchett, who plays a kind of mid-1960s Dylan, is quoted:

“I think that’s the greatness of the idea is that he’s splitting Dylan’s person into so many different ways,” said Blanchett. “To a Woodie Guthrie type figure, a TV evangelist. I play him when he went electric. Into an actor. Into an 18th century poet, a 17th century poet. And I think when you juxtapose all those different personas, then you get a sense of his spirit. Or his shape shifting.”

Each Bob is filmed in a different style too, as Blanchett described hers. “Mine’s in black and white and I think some of them are hypercolored. Todd is a genre defying film director to begin with. If you look back to his film school thing about Karen Carpenter, if you’ve seen it, with the Barbie dolls, it’s amazing. He thinks so laterally, in such a Todd Haynes way. I don’t think anyone else could have conceived of the idea. And it’s great because the fact that I’m a woman, automatically you have that Brechtian distance between the persona of Dylan and the form of the film liberates it from being a biopic.”

Blanchett admits she is terrified about portraying even a sixth of Bob Dylan. “I think it’s probably the expectations. I was terrified doing it because he and I had no interest in imitating Dylan but yet Todd was really specific that I wore a suit that he wore in 1965, like the exact suit that he wore in Manchester. And the hair. He wants those iconic references but yet he doesn’t want an imitation, so it was a really difficult tightrope to walk which I hope I walked without falling off too often.”

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