I’m Not There

The best way to get a grip on Todd Haynes’s extraordinary, mind-blowing I’m Not There is to begin with what it isn’t: a Walk the Line–style biopic about Bob Dylan. For starters, the name Bob Dylan is never mentioned. Some chapters adhere to events with a rigorous fidelity and feature dead-on impersonations, while others exist solely in the realm of far-out fantasy. And Haynes employs six different actors to portray the musical pioneer, including a 13-year-old African-American boy, a frontiersman Richard Gere and—as the caustic ’65 edition—Cate Blanchett. Sound pretentious? It is. Does it work? For the most part, wondrously.

I’m Not There is essentially the cinematic equivalent of what Dylan did to American music in the ’60s: Haynes smashes a variety of influences together, keeps what moves him and creates a totally new vocabulary. The director has made a bootleg remix of Dylan’s life story that juxtaposes the facts with Warholian Pop Art, Godard’s wink-wink meta-tricks, cinema vérité, A Hard Day’s Night, Beat literature and romantic poetry. Never mind the official version; this is the biopic as The Basement Tapes.

The film succeeds most during the separate sequences starring Blanchett and Christian Bale; the actors mimic Dylan’s mannerisms with eerie accuracy and manage to capture the singer’s prickly, know-it-all charisma. On the other hand, the ­overextended metaphor of the Gere section — set in Riddle, Missouri, where everyone wears masks — couldn’t be more groan-worthy. Still, the overall accomplishment of I’m Not There outweighs the occasional ­off-key verses, and the inclusion of both original and cover versions of Dylan songs on the soundtrack serves as a nice complement to the kitchen-sink aesthetic. You walk away convinced not only that Haynes’s gamble offers a peek into the psyche(s) of a genius but also that this is the only way you could make a movie about Dylan and do the slippery subject justice.

A less successful foray into bold, outside-the-box filmmaking is Youth Without Youth, the first movie in a decade from famed director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now). A sci-fi film about an elderly man (Tim Roth) who starts aging in reverse (don’t ask), it’s part intimate love story, part globe­trotting supernatural thriller, part metaphysical meditation on memory and part personal statement about recapturing one’s creative spark. Like I’m Not There, it’s a merry-go-round of stylistic tics; unlike Haynes’s magnum opus, however, this experimental epic is a bona fide mess without much of a payoff. Every so often, Coppola comes up with a beautiful shot or stages a sequence, like Roth’s chat with some ghostly pub dwellers, that reminds you he’s still capable of brilliance. Youth Without Youth makes you wish Coppola himself could turn back the clock to when he was 35 and at the height of his powers.

Did someone declare December teen-heroine month and not tell us? Young women, ranging from the spunky to the downright scary, are at the center of no less than three new films. The best of the bunch, Juno, features Ellen Page as a high school senior who finds herself knocked up by Superbad’s Michael Cera. The deluge of sarcastic, slang-heavy dialogue at the beginning of the film is almost unbearably self-conscious and snarky, but director Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking) wisely tones things down once the young woman signs up to be a surrogate mother for yuppies Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. What starts out as an exercise in sourpuss cynicism turns into a genuinely sweet comedy, and even the twee soundtrack (courtesy of the Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson) can’t ruin things.

Persepolis is an animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel about growing up loving heavy metal and Adidas in 1970s Iran. This coming-of-age movie, which Satrapi codirected, replicates the writer-artist’s minimalist, black-and-white style down to the last squiggle, adding immensely to the feeling of watching a stunning moving-picture book. Just as compelling is the way the film is able to filter three decades of political turmoil through the eyes of one angry, confused exile. You’ll never hear that “symbol of Western decadence” known as Iron Maiden’s Killers the same way again.

As for director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth — in which a goody-two-shoes high school student (Jess Weixler) discovers that her vagina has grown teeth and proceeds to use her fearsome lady parts to exact revenge on a host of sexual predators — the less said the better. Lichtenstein flirts with the idea that his character’s condition is some significant feminist statement, but the many poorly staged gross-out moments — oh, yes, there will be shots of chewed-up penises — make this little more than a crude bid for cult-movie status.