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Special Dylan Film Review
As the story of Bob Dylan is told through new cinematic release 'I'm Not There', Joel Henderson give us the skinny.This film is so self-consciously over stylised and knowingly laden with unsubtle laid-on-with-a-trowel imagery it feels like it’s been dreamt up by an irritating 6th former who should go and get himself a life. It’s constantly self-referencing, the black & white sequences purposefully look like a Fellini film and other parts are very French New Wave, but with none of the originality and all of the pomposity.
The only other field that borrows so heavily from those films is that of pretentious aftershave adverts, making enduring ‘I’m Not There’ like watching a 2h 15min advert for a line of Bob Dylan smelling fragrances, ‘Zimmerman pour homme’, which, if this film is anything to go by, smells of endless cigarettes, vomit, affected portentousness and tramps in box cars - not something I really want to smell of.
With a lack of emotional centre, most of ‘the Dylans’ were irritating and dislikeable, particularly Kate Blanchett. Yes, the music is great (it is Dylan’s after all) and so is ‘the young Dylan’, played by the likeable Marcus Carl Franklin, but that is as far as my praise goes.
Written by Joel Henderson
2/10
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