I’m Not There (35mm)

A kaleidoscope containing, in tireless motion, facets of a troubadour known to the world as Bob Dylan. Or rather doesn't know him. Or rather, imagines it knows him. Until one day the singer-songwriter, who has been provisionally arrested, gets back into his spaceship and flies back to the planet of poetry.

A musician biopic about Robert Allen Zimmermann, born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, who is one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century with his guitar, harmonica and self-written songs performed in a squeezed-sounding voice. Unsurprisingly, he is once seen rolling around on an English lawn with the Beatles. The alter ego named Jude, played by Cate Blanchett (awarded the Coppa Volpi in Venice, where Haynes also received the Grand Jury Prize), is out and about in the drug fog of London, escaping the media circus at the centre of which he finds himself after the notorious electric guitar scandal.

Also included are: The Hobo, who performs protest songs in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie. The beatnik aficionado who (thanks to Joan Baez) discovers his affinity for the folk music movement. The failing family man, the (fake-sounding) preacher, the melancholy outlaw. Something like that. Six actors embody the guises, ages and creative phases of an artist, and cinematographer Edward Lachman, with whom Haynes regularly collaborates, gives each of them their own visual style: Arthur, Billy, Jack, Jude, Robbie and Woody. Giving birth to Troubadour Bob. No, of course not. Out of the vaporous web that is this film, and in which the now Nobel Prize winner for literature finally disappears for good, his songs resound in large numbers. Sound events, air made to vibrate. Again, nothing tangible ...

(Text: Alexandra Seitz)