Pilgrim on Tinker Street: Desperately Seeking Dylan at the Woodstock Film Festival

There were no more condoms in the Sunflower Natural Foods Market by Sunday afternoon. The empty shelf where they'd been looked lonely, above the cruelty-free, leadless lipsticks I'd gone there to choose from. Had they sold out just because of the big weekend? I asked the mild-looking, long-haired, pleasant kid at the register. He looked at me as if trying to determine my needs. "I don't know." Happy smile. "But I've got some at home." Ah, Woodstock. Friendliest of towns for lo these fifty years. And with the Eighth Annual Film Festival in town, showcasing on its final night the Big Music Movie, no wonder some amenities were hard to come by.

Tickets for the last show of the last night were hard to come by, too. They had sold out online very quickly, to the disgust of some locals in a town where both cellphone signals and laptops get shut out by the Catskills (the sight of movie people shaking their BlackBerries angrily by the village green in the brilliant sunshine could only make you smile). "I'm Not There," the mockumentary that bobs and weaves all round and about the absent presence of Bob Dylan, has been screened before, and it's due to open nationally on November 21 in New York. The tiny Tinker Street Cinema is right where it belongs, though, and "I'm Not There" should stay right there. A multiplex will crush it like a bug, and Woodstock, where Dylan is still spoken of as a friend and neighbor - and might just still own a big chunk of land, somewhere up Ohayo Mountain - has the requisite kind of audience. That's to say an audience in which all the members knew something about Dylan, and many of them knew a lot.

All weekend, there were related events that could only have come to pass in this town. The Lotus Gallery on Rock City Road had hung a show of Elliot Landy's Dylan photographs - tenderly taken, not striving to intrude or redefine, but to entertain the sitters, and to preserve what Wordsworth would call a spot in time. At the opening on a golden Saturday afternoon, you couldn't see the photos for the people - there was even a Dylan Look-Alike contest, judged by, among others, Mary Lou Patarell, above whose coffeeshop on Tinker Street Bob once lived. Zach Sluser, a filmmaker from L.A., won the contest because of the Ray-Bans he borrowed from a friend at the last minute ("It's the glasses," one judge said to another in their huddle next to me) and the cigarette ("I don't smoke. I borrowed it," said Sluser). Landy walked around beaming, welcoming. He seems a kind, modest soul, and when speaking of his photos of Dylan, the Band, and Woodstock (nope, it didn't happen in town, so don't ask where the site is), appears grateful to have been in the right place at a right-on time. People were talking about the movie, and what to expect, as they looked into Landy's capturings of the young face of the man who had agreed to have this family part of his life, among others, opened to a chronicling not his own.

Todd Haynes, who had the idea for a biopic of Dylan, gained the needed clearance and authorizations (as he infamously didn't for his take on Karen Carpenter via Barbie, barred from release by the Carpenter estate), wrote the screenplay, and made the film, wasn't in Woodstock. His co-producer and Maverick Award winner Christine Vachon said he had "really wanted to be." Speaking before the screening that Sunday, Vachon felt the vibe, noting "It's really amazing to show this movie at Woodstock ....This place had a huge effect on the movie you're about to see." Quickly she retracted the word "experimental" after applying it - rightly - to "I'm Not There," and substituted the thought, one she attributed to Haynes, that this is a movie that "you should let wash over you." And so we settled back to watch the river flow. Vachon also referred to the movie as a "labor of love" just as the screening was beginning. Well, it's certainly as undefinable, splintered, and abandoned as love.

"I'm Not There" is a series of tangentially related sketches that are so popular these days - do they save a screenwriter from having to think up and write a whole movie? "Babel" at least entwined the stories of which it was composed, and had them fall together like dominoes. The sketches are a nice cultural comment: our 15-minute attention span (and yes, of course there's a cameo clip of Warhol in "I'm Not There") can't take more. Horton Foote and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt and Robert Bolt, where are you when we need you? Bob Dylan deserves continuity and something at least acquainted with grandeur, not this sort of shotgun approach. Haynes's movie makes a pattern in your mind like pellets blasted through a door: scattershot, hit and miss, above all no direction home.

The movie begins, upsettingly more than provocatively, with Dylan dead. A good way to ensure freedom in a pseudobiopic, maybe: kill off your star. The Bob avatar who lies first on a table in the morgue, with doctors opening him, that is her, up with scalpels (ok, block that metaphor! We get it: this is going to be a really intense, beneath-the-skin look at Dylan) is the one who looks most like Dylan, Cate Blanchett as a character named Jude Quinn. Jude's footage is in black and white, just like "Dont Look Back" and the rest of the D.A. Pennebaker - well, yes, you may call it the Pennebaker original. Shift scene (in a brutal sudden smash cut; more metaphor and yep, we get it: our heads are supposed to be swimming) to Jude in casket, "nailed by a Peeping Tom," and a flat stretch of road evidently meant to be Woodstock, where Dylan wrecked his motorcycle in 1969. The audience rustled, murmured, for the straightaway road with no mountains behind it looks nothing like the pertinent landscape. But verisimilitude is the hobgoblin of little minds. Even in what has been advertised as a biopic. We remained quiet and paid attention. One must, or "I'm Not There" is drowning you fast, instead of washing over you.

The first story - and none is ever completed; they all loop back, and through each other, and intrude upon each other, which is fine for the lyrics of a Dylan song, but visually and connectively a pain in the ass for any moviegoer, even one raised on Fellini and Antonioni - is that of Woody Guthrie, a little black boy who says he's from Riddle, Missouri. He isn't; he's from a children's correction facility in Minneapolis (giggle from the audience at this line). But he's got the guitar in a case that says "This Machine Kills Fascists," the ability to hop a moving freight train, the gift of the gab, and one of the most engaging smiles you've seen. The young actor playing Woody as Dylan in Life One is an immensely talented, irresistibly cute young actor with a perfectly down-home sounding handle, Marcus Carl Franklin. He owns every scene he's in, he can sing, and the freshness of his eager voice makes some of the most ponderous lines bearable. Had a line like "Truth is my mind got used to ramblin' when I was so young" been given to the character called Arthur Rimbaud (and unhappily many are) it would fall like an anvil (and they do). From Franklin's face, it delights. His Woody is cocky, certain, lyrical. "What brings you round these parts?" one of the old hobos wants to know. "Carelessness," says the child. You have to laugh. One of the best scenes in the movie is the boy with his guitar, playing and singing "Tombstone Blues" with two older men - one of them Richie Havens - on a front porch, somewhere way down south. When young Woody goes, with flowers, to visit the dying Woody Guthrie in New Jersey, the scene of him walking slowly down the hall - and then sitting with tears on his face, strumming the guitar for the man in the tiny sad bed - got little noises of sympathy from the crowd.

Woody is introduced in the wake of "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." I've got to say it: the soundtrack is the best part of the movie, with the sung lyrics, in versions done both by Dylan and others, working almost like a voice-over throughout "I'm Not There." And, perhaps consequently, the best parts of the visual aspect of the movie are where the songs literally take over, and the movie becomes a music video: Jude mocking a BBC arts reporter with "Ballad of a Thin Man;" Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Robbie and Claire Clark, drifting apart to "Visions of Johanna;" and a stunning "I'm Not There" from a bandstand in a tiny weird carnival town that snuck into its namesake movie from the backlot of "Masked and Anonymous."

"Memphis Blues" rolls over us as someone rides on a subway train, through a coal mine, passing throngs of staring faces (oh yeah, once more, we get it: you can't take your eyes off Dylan, and everyone on the planet, or at least in these American moments, knows who he is). Suddenly (it's all sudden, even the slow scenes) we go crash into color, a hobo running through impossibly green fields. He's short but able to hitch himself into an open boxcar. The engaging kid with a guitar and a stream of babble baffles the improbably kind old hobos already resident in the car (improbably kind, but there will be mean ones later, who drive him to jump off a bridge and be chased by a small computer-generated whale. Don't ask).

Just as we're getting interested in Woody and knowing about him, smash cut to "Arthur Rimbaud," Dylan Two. He's a grubby, eyerubbing 19-year old who spends his time in the film being shot in black and white, being questioned by a roomful of older men, and spouting poetry and/or nonsense. In his 1965 San Francisco interview, Dylan named as his favorite poets Rimbaud, W.C. Fields, the Flying Wallendas, Smokey Robinson, Allen Ginsberg, and Charlie Rich. Out of such a bountiful field, Haynes had to pick Rimbaud? Ben Whishaw does well what's asked of him, but Arthur's onscreen time is mercifully brief. When he asks if he can smoke my neighbor cringed, she said at the end of the evening, in horror at the thought of him uncrossing and crossing his legs Sharon-Stone-style for the room (and this movie is full of little gimmick moments like that, reminders of popcult films. We get it: we saw them too, and being made to think of them during "I'm Not There" makes a fragmented film go all the more to pieces.)

The perfect segue into Dylan Three is old documentary footage of the Village: a great moment of Pete Seeger singing, Izzy Young's Folklore Center, Café Wha.' Time has come for Jack Rollins, Life Three: Christian Bale appears, looking very like Christian Bale, with the iconic Dylan profile-and-chevelure silhouette behind him. Scattered giggles in the house. Christian Bale has lost 50 pounds again, I thought. No matter; he turns out to be one of the best things about the movie. For this times-changin' Dylan, the commentary is chiefly provided by Julianne Moore as Alice Fabian, a/k/a Joan Baez. The flashback photo of Alice in her folkie heyday, with Moore in a long black, no not veil, wig, and miming perfectly Baez's half-open eyes and the way her mouth looked as she sang, got the first loud appreciative laugh from the audience. We got it! Because, of course, we were an audience entirely familiar with the Joanie from Newport and "Dont Look Back" days. It's definite by now: if you don't know anything about Dylan, or not enough about Dylan, his career, and something of the time period covered by the movie, you're not going to be among the we-got-its, and you're not going to get it from the film. Listening to Alice remember Jack Rollins is like reading Baez's memoir, as Haynes doubtless did. When she calls Jack "this little toad" who was cranking out songs a mile a minute - "he was turnin' 'em out like ticker tape," more laughter. Moore is, as ever, both good and lovely, and at the end I heard more than one person wishing that her extended cameo had run longer.

The best actor award in "I'm Not There" goes not to the much-touted movie-poster-Bob Cate Blanchett, though she's very fine, but to Christian Bale. I've never liked him, though his recent turn as the object of Russell Crowe's affections in "3:10 to Yuma" began to bring me around. His Jack Rollins starts off stilted and shy, gets silly and sloppy and offensive, finds Jesus with the help of a lover who's an African-American woman, and is last seen as a minister, devoted to the Gateway Brotherhood Church for 20 years. Bale is excellent, whether singing "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" in a hunched, tense crouch, almost ashamed to be performing it Down South in front of the audience he finds around him, or filled with the spirit and music of the Lord in a crappy church fellowship hall the last time we see him (a breathtaking performance, from the seventies hairstyle to the tapping snakeskin boots).

Cate Blanchett survived "Babel" and she survives this film, with flying colors though she's always in black and white. Paul Simon was right when he told us everything looks worse that way - but it's what you need, of course, for the "Dont Look Back" version of Dylan. Jude Quinn is Dylan at a moment of high success and, evidently, low personal ebb. Introduced as dead, and the flashback shots of the motorcycle accident are chilling - the audience was very quiet - Jude is dynamite in Blanchett's spreading, flapping, never-resting white hands. Whether he's letting the thud of his own heartbeat lead him onstage to silence a crowd objecting to electric sound with machine guns (a splendid parody of Newport all around), or slumping disgusted in front of a t.v. in a London hotel as the snippy, perceptive BBC reporter Mr. Jones (a superb Bruce Greenwood) reveals him to be Aaron Jacob Edelstein of Brookline, Mass., you can't take your eyes off Jude. The fingernails are all wrong - Jude's guitar-picking thumbnail and forefinger are manicured short, with a super-long coke-sniffer's pinkie nail instead (is this Haynes's way of arguing the Jude Dylan as more junkie than musician, or just a filmic screw-up?) - but the hands, and every bit of the rest of Blanchett's physical characterizations, are spot-on. The little herky-jerky walk with which Jude chases Coco (Michelle Williams, channeling Edie) through an English garden is the only part of the movie that made me feel like I was looking at Dylan.

Every time Blanchett delivers a line like "I'm the only one who has the balls" or, worst of all, "ain't that just like a woman" - and unhappily Haynes puts in way too many cheap gender laughers for her - it's a reminder that she's NOT A GUY. Don't worry, Todd. We got it. In this thread of "I'm Not There," the depictions of Albert Grossman and Bob Neuwirth are both amusing - particularly the Grossman, in the hands and heft of Mark Camacho, strident and entitled and coiffed like a cross between Graydon Carter and the Abominable Snowman. The Allen Ginsberg character is a caricature that insults: David Cross, who looks tremendously like Allen at the time, is called upon to play him as a genial buffoon leading Jude astray. The scene where they shout things like "you better get down offa that thing," "How does it feel?" and "Do your early stuff" at a row of crucifixes, while giggling hysterically, falls flat and ugly - a sick parody of the sweet old footage of Dylan and Ginsberg in the graveyard in Lowell where Jack Kerouac lies under a tombstone bearing his nickname, "Ti-Jean." Haynes has said Jude is his "Jewish Dylan," and so he's already set to welcome the flak he's going to get for this one. But Jude also gets to chew, and roll about in, the scenery more than any of the other avatars: cavorting on the grass, and on the grass, with the Beatles; strung out and behaving badly at a party; making peace in a hotel room after a young waiter pulls a knife; and delivering a long series of statements on folk music and other matters from the back seat of a car in the night. In this scene Blanchett looks more and more like herself - in a transformation you can almost see as the camera is running. Her cheeks lose the hollowness (and the cheekbones assume Blanchettian prominence), her eyes the tiredness, her lips the thinness, and even her nose begins to look different. Her wig is no longer scruffy and foamy - Bob the Regency dandy with flashing eyes and floating hair - but now it's composed of perfectly tight little ringlets. Zounds. She's become Elizabeth, before our wondering eyes.

Want what Haynes is striving for in Blanchett's Jude, in its purest form? Go to YouTube.com. Put in the search terms "Dylan," "bathe," and "bird." Sit back and enjoy, and be eternally grateful to one of the best filmmakers of modern times, and one of the most affable men in an unaffable business, Donn Pennebaker. Without him this movie quite literally could not have been made. And perhaps would not have been made - one feels Haynes has watched "Dont Look Back" and "Eat the Document" hundreds of times, and this is among the reasons that make the Jude portions the longest, and best, in "I'm Not There."

Second longest - and it's a long movie at two hours, and feels it - is the story of Robbie Clark, an actor who makes his name playing Jack Rollins in a biopic. Yet again, we got it: we'd already gotten the metatextual, self-referential, points of this movie before sitting down in the theater, and without such a contrivance. Heath Ledger as Dylan Five, Robbie, chiefly provides easiness on the eyes and a good physical counterpoint for Charlotte Gainsbourg. It's fun to see Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's talented child playing a Suze Rotolo/Sara Lowndes composite character, but her role ends up a pretty thankless one. Whether this is biographical or not depends, I guess, on whether you buy Haynes's point of view. For "I'm Not There" purposes, Gainsbourg's Claire Clarke is there to provide energetic, exuberant young sex, and child care for two adorable daughters; and her long, sad face and bottomless eyes are perfect for all the brooding she does in front of the t.v., watching Vietnam War footage.

Ledger gives good inarticulate, as he proved when he came down the stairs at Jack Twist's parents' farm in "Brokeback Mountain," silent and stricken, carrying those two bloodstained cowboy shirts. Here he's pretty much playing a jerk with no gift for words, but an appealing and sometimes sensitive jerk. The girl knows what she's getting from the get-go: a 22-year-old overnight star who knows that at the center of his world is "me." Well before they've started a family, she comes out in search of him at a cool Village party to find him lounging on a fire escape, one hand far up the miniskirt of a girl whose face, appropriately, we never see. Claire is into politics, making a difference, abstract art, and - soon - her daughters. You don't ever feel that she's that into him, or he her: they are just narcissistic mirrors for each other. They try to communicate on phones that ring on either end but never connect (we get it! They're NOT THERE). Only as they separate, and after the split, do you get more - the scene where they comfort each other with sex as she has her suitcases by the door is predictable, but moving all the same; and their interactions over the children feel kind. There's not enough in this Dylan Four to sustain even a short film, but it's the only one that makes you sense the possibility. And its soundtrack is excellent, especially "Idiot Wind" and "Visions of Johanna."

The center, if there'd been one, just wasn't holding at this point in the movie. The laughs, such as they were (and a shot of a giant head of L.B.J. saying "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken" is worth the price of admission), had pretty much ceased. And Dylan, or rather "Dylan," was turning into not a translation but a caricature. He seems downright simian in three incarnations: Bale's early moments, Whishaw's Arthur, and Blanchett's Jude. He twitches, crouches, scratches, picks, and gibbers, his (or her) body miming an ape's in a zoo. After too much time with these Bobs, the spirit was rubbing off on the audience; they'd been in those seats for awhile, and were squirming unhappily. Gimmicks and stunts were abounding: little Woody leaps from a rushing train and into a river, where he is chased by a weird little whale (we don't get it: Jonah? Or is this Haynes's metaphorical way of saying Melville haunts Dylan?). Cate, I mean Jude, won't go away, despite having wrecked the motorcycle. We keep seeing Richard Gere, almost unrecognizably hairy and shiny-faced, sleeping in a cabin in the woods, for only a few seconds at a time (we don't get it: Dylan as Thoreau? as Unabomber?). One of the best shifts Haynes makes is to spirit us away from the young urban Bob to the old country Bob, letting the focus stay for a good long time on Dylan Six, Billy (the Kid). Unfortunately, the movie remains jumpy and studiedly bizarre, instead of becoming in the end what it's been striving so hard to be all along: rich and strange.

We've come from Pennebaker to Peckinpah, now, and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," the 1973 movie for which Dylan wrote the soundtrack and momentarily appeared, in one of his usual uncomfortable turns when cameras are facing him down. For a man who seems to love the movies, given the number of stars and films coursing through his lyrics, and given his William-Powell, Clark-Gable, Errol-Flynn (yeah, ok, Vincent-Price too) mustache and longtime cowboy lilt, Dylan is never at ease on film. "Masked and Anonymous" proved that definitively, and this segment of "I'm Not There" owes as much to it as to "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." It's the least comprehensible, if that matters, part of the movie, but entertaining enough. Richard Gere as Billy is not afraid to look old and smelly, playing a loner out in the woods with his horse and (briefly) his dog (her name is Henry, and she runs away). He rides through a kaleidoscope of beautiful mountain country and weird traveling circuses and freakshows in the aptly named town of Riddle, a town that's about to fall to a superhighway engineered by mean old Mr. Potter, I mean Mr. Garrett. Pretty soon it looks and feels like we've drifted into Lago, the doomed town of "High Plains Drifter." There's a lot of death, and poorly applied face paint, and commotion in Riddle, but there's also some fine singing and good acting.

Riddle is the right place for the setting of "I'm Not There," from beginning to end. One of its virtues is that the movie's not set anywhere in particular. You feel the Deep South, the Midwest, Woodstock, Greenwich Village, London, but, other than the Jude scenes in London and a ridiculous chase through the Louvre at night (we got it: all 60s movies with scenes set in France have the obligatory chase scene there), it's not mandated that you must accept the events transpiring in one place or another. And the settings mesh and meld as the characters do: Jude is in Woodstock, along with Robbie and his wife and family, in a place that looks little like Woodstock and more like Amagansett. Billy and Woody intersect in Riddle, which looks less like Missouri than the valley from Woodstock to Mt. Tremper.

Haynes's use of songs from different times in Dylan's career further upsets both setting and time, in a way that's provocative and smart. We think we have a fix on a character like Jude: "Dont Look Back," pure and simple. Then "Cold Irons Bound" takes over as Jude's soundtrack, as he watches a girl pour lighter fluid on her head and toss a match while his car pulls away. The new interpretations of Dylan classics by Blanchett, Franklin, Sonic Youth, Iggy and the Stooges, and the Million Dollar Bashers (whose lineup includes Tom Verlaine and longtime Dylan band member Tony Garnier) are unintrusive, but it's The Voice that you're listening for.

When Dylan actually appears on the screen it's tremendously jarring, after all you've just been through. He closes out the movie in a sweet clip from "Eat The Document," standing onstage almost in the dark (his eyes, nose, and upper lip are all you can see), giving us the old in-and-out on the harmonica during "Mr. Tambourine Man." I hope Haynes takes this moment out of the movie before it's finally released, because as fine as it is, it simply doesn't belong at the end of this meandering mosaic of a movie. To see the man himself just makes it all too concise and too clear that ... well, you know.

Will Dylan ever sit through this movie that's about - in the very loosest sense of the preposition, like a robe wrapped about you - him? Haynes said at the New York Film Festival that he got "Dylan's blessing" for the movie, and he speculates that Dylan will watch the movie - he gave Dylan's son Jesse, a filmmaker, a copy of the DVD - on his "movable tour bus." Movable tour bus is beautifully redundant, but it's true that the Bobmobile has a video screen. It passed me on the New York Thruway heading for Syracuse after a concert in Albany, catching up to its twin with Tennessee plates, ferrying Elvis Costello, on the rainy night of October the 6th. Black and white, playing on the box, flickered through the slats in the streamlined shutters. Was it Jude or Arthur up there? Or was it Myrna Loy and William Powell, Gable and Harlow, Cooper and Kelly? Who was traveling? And who was watching? We'll never know, and it's absolutely none of our business. Bob Dylan hasn't agreed to give up the rights for everything.