I'm Not There

I'm Not There is a fascinating bio-pic based on different phases of Bob Dylan's life and music. The acting and writing is consistently excellent and the premise, that Dylan has consistently confounded people's expectations of him by reinventing himself, fits well with the trajectory of his career and much that he has said or written about himself.

Our culture generally encourages individuals to look inside themselves and find their 'real' persona. Dylan has done the reverse by adopting different personas. The film argues that he has done this to escape from the expectations placed on him at different stages of his career; others have argued that it was to avoid revealing the truth about his origins. This could appear insincere and yet he seems to genuinely live out each persona for the period that he inhabits it.

The new persona is adopted to escape the expectations generated by the former persona and therefore, although he is control by continually keeping ahead of his audience, there is also a sense of being out of control by being in flight from people's expectations. Another approach to sincerity might be to ask whether, the earlier personas are simply discarded or integrated. In this way, his life could be seen as a developing patchwork or mosaic of the personas or masks that have been worn. Does this, I wonder, mirror his Theme Time Radio Hour which is also a patchwork or mosaic of different music grouped around a particular theme?

The most undeveloped section of the film is the 'Christian' period which is portrayed as a reaction to the 'voice of his generation' Dylan. On the special features, it is also talked about as an escape from his Jewish heritage. The Pastor John figure is portrayed as inhabiting that persona in his sermon and a great performance of Pressing On but there is a greater sense of what this persona appears to be in reaction to than what it means to inhabit it (partly because this part of the story is simply not given the space and time afforded to the other personas).

Portraying it simply as a period also overlooks the sense in which Dylan's art is fundamentally informed by the Bible throughout his career. Biblical imagery and apocalyptic frameworks are a constant within Dylan's work and not something restricted to a 'Christian' period, as portrayed here.

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Bob Dylan - Pressing On.