I'm Not There

I'm Not There (2007) is Todd Haynes' music drama you can watch online on iFILM. Instead of a tidy life story, it splits Bob Dylan into six characters played by six actors, and never once calls any of them by his name.

A young Black boy rides freight trains and answers to Woody Guthrie. A folk singer named Jack Rollins drifts into preaching. Cate Blanchett takes on the mid-sixties Dylan, the one who plugged in an electric guitar and turned a folk crowd hostile. Heath Ledger plays an actor watching his marriage fall apart. Richard Gere disappears into a Western as an aging Billy the Kid, while Ben Whishaw fires off answers under interrogation like lines pulled from Rimbaud. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Michelle Williams round out the women in their orbit.

Haynes builds the film as a collage of masks, shooting each strand in its own register, from grainy black and white to saturated color. Blanchett's turn earned an Academy Award nomination. Stream I'm Not There (2007) online on iFILM.