Worst movie of the year? No competition: it’s that “Bob Dylan” movie, I’m Not There.  Half an hour into it, I was wishing the title had been true.  Why was I there? Because some idiot writing for the New York Times praised it to the skies.  He couldn’t get over the brilliance of casting seven different people to play Dylan.  What could moviemaker Tod Haynes possibly have been getting at, casting many different people to play that one role?

Gee, could he have been saying there are many different Dylans, no single one of them the real Dylan? Gosh, once you think of it that way, can you think of a more bull-ahead, ham-handed, no-nuance way of expressing that meager point?

What’s more, once you’ve said that Dylan is many different people, what else can you do with this device? In Haynes’s clumsy fists—nothing. The other night, I was listening to a group of people talking about the late Heath Ledger, and someone noted that he played “one of the Dylans” in that movie.   “Oh?” said someone else. “Which one?”

A silence ensued: no one could think of any way to identify any of the Dylans except by the different actors that played them. Heath Ledger played the one that was, you know… the one that was played by Heath Ledger. 

Ah, but it gets worse. Dylan has an extremely distinctive voice and diction. It’s hard for anyone to play Dylan without doing a Bob Dylan impression. Not unavoidable, perhaps, but in this movie, not avoided. As an audience, therefore, what we’re watching here is a parade of actors doing their Dylan impressions.  We can’t focus on what the characters are saying because we’re too busy noticing how good or bad the actors’ Dylan-impressions are, how close they’re coming to the real thing. If you’ve talked to anyone who likes this movie, you’ve probably heard that Gwyneth Paltrow really looks and sounds like Dylan. That’s what the movie pushes into your face. Let me note, however, that when you’re listening to the real Dylan, you’re not marveling at how much he sounds like Dylan; you’re listening to what he’s saying. That’s the experience no Dylan impression can capture.

Then again, in this movie, anything that distracts attention from people’s actual words may be a blessing, because every single line in the movie that was not written by Dylan is astoundingly clichéd. It’s inherantly impossible for every word in a script to be a cliché, but this movie flirts with the impossible. I said “every single line that was not written by Dylan” because Dylan’s own words are very much present here: his songs constitute the soundtrack. But the words spoken by the various actor-Dylans all come from Haynes and his associates.  

And what words they are! I’m remembering one scene at some gallery in which the actor playing Dylan has behaved badly to a woman and sent her running off in a huff. The Dylan impersonator then leans over a banister. The camera catches him from below, framed in the stairwell, against the stark white of the gallery walls: get ready, says the visual setup, quotable quote coming up, a Dylanesque moment.

And then it comes: “Love and sex, man… are two things….” (wait for it) “that really …” (here it comes) “hang people up.” Oh! Ouch! Help! Too brilliant!  Please! No more—ah, but there is more. Shut up and drink in the wisdom: “And how they’re related…I’ll never fully comprehend.” 

Want it again? Here it is without my intrusive voice scoffing and sneering:

“Love and sex are two things that really hang people up
and how they’re related I’ll never fully comprehend.

I’m Not There gives you two hours of this crap, right alongside the actual Dylan singing things like:

Twenty years of schoolin’ and the put you on the day shift
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did–
don’t know when
but you’re doin’ it again–
man in the trenchcoat
wants eleven dollar
bills you only got ten!

Someone said to me, “Well, at least the movie has lots of Dylan music. That alone has to make it worth seeing. Doesn’t it?”

Look: if you get a slice of delicious lemon meringue pie served on a plate with somebody else’s leftovers, it ain’t great.