Bob Dylan Isn’t “There”

If Blanchett's Jude is the most recognizable Dylan — and the performance that even those who hate the film won't be able to stop talking about — then Gere's Billy the Kid is the most enigmatic, the one who seems at once the ghost of the musician's roots-music past and the spirit of his eternal present, the living phantom embarked on his self-proclaimed "never-ending tour." "You've got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen," he muses late in the film, at once paraphrasing Dylan (from a 1978 interview about his songwriting style) and succinctly summarizing the Moebius-strip structure of Haynes's film. And so the most lasting image of I'm Not There may well be its last, in which the Kid picks up Woody Guthrie's guitar and hops yet another boxcar, as a train pulls down the line and a soulful harmonica blows its ageless tune.