Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a postmortem–but of what, exactly? It opens with the examination of a corpse, played by Cate Blanchett; the press notes tell us we’re supposed to connect this image to Bob Dylan’s 1968 motorcycle accident, in which he almost died but didn’t, and after which he was allegedly never the same. So on some level, it’s a love letter to a dead man whose body is still with us-–although, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of the film yesterday, Haynes kept referring to Dylan in the past tense, as though his own private Dylan was long gone and never to return–but it’s also a catalogue of various shards of the dead culture of the 1960s. It’s as vital as it sounds: like so many of Haynes’ films, it’s based on a provocative concept that plays in practice like a museum piece.

It’s a collage of personality impressions and visual styles. Grainy, fluttering black and white gives way to a bottle green landscape, spotted with the second best psychedelic lens flares of the NYFF thus far. The film’s hallucinatory logic seems at first to defy any kind of stricture, until the references start to stack up: visual quotations from Dylan album covers, The Beatles doing silent comedy, La Strada; actual, scripted quotations from at least two Godard films. Each of the six protagonists is a walking (though hardly living or breathing) quotation, a riff on a Dylan phase or personality thread. A young ruffian who uses poetry to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man. A prepubescent compulsive liar. A misunderstood prophet who finds his true calling by turning to God. An aging cowboy in hiding, laying low in a town obsessed with Halloween. A bad actor who becomes a big star and neglects the woman he loves. A put-opon speed freak who uses pop music to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man.

Fittingly, our intro to Haynes’ composite Dylan is Woody, a black child first seen hopping frieght trains with a guitar case bigger than him emblazoned with the text, “This machine kills facists.” Woody introduces himself as Woody Guthrie to a pair of incredulous hoboes, who slurp up his ever-mutating biography. The tone is set: Bob Dylan’s personal myth-making is nothing but boxcar bullshit. Sure enough, soon a kindly, mother-figure tells Woody to cut the nostalgic jive and “sing your own time”, and we cut to Christian Bale as Jack Rollins (or, Dylan in protest mode) singin’ about how his times they are a changin’. The through line is clear, but the transfer of identity is a letdown–the liar was enigmatic, the earnest “fingerpointer” is a bore.

Haynes’ film is so surface-oriented that it can really only be engaged with superficially. It’s a portrait of an artist as an empty vessel. Haynes’ Dylan, in all his many forms, is anger and bravado, rightous indignation and outward projection, but never convincing as a human being with an inner life. Yes, I get it — this is the point, that the Dylan persona is constantly mutating and disappearing, that the real Dylan is fundamentally unknowable. But six hollow ciphers are no substitute for a real protagonist. The title is perhaps more apt than Haynes wants you to believe.

Haynes’ previous work, Far From Heaven, wasn’t so much a film as a work of academic activism. As a gay man, Haynes saw a subtext in Douglas Sirk’s films that spoke to him, and Heaven was essentially an experiment in pushing that subtext up to the top level. It felt rote, too studied, stripped of the guts that make those mid-century melodramas so effective even in their most austere moments of restraint. I’m Not There has a similar feeling of being an exercise, except this time, Haynes has broadened his scope to include an entire decade’s detritus. I imagine your results with this will vary. Dylan fans seem to get a real kick out of Haynes’ interpolations of the songs and the history. My knowledge of Dylan’s music is minimal, so those references largely went over my head; I got the references to Fellini, Richard Lester and Psycho, but they did nothing for me. To me, I’m Not There functions on the same level of empty, literal nostalgia as Across the Universe. Haynes brings the detached cool, making his exercise in self-indulgent nostalgia safe for hipsters; Julie Taymor’s film is more garish, but at least it shoots for an emotional response.

I saw the first forty minutes or so of I’m Not There at an outdoor screening in Telluride. It was my fourth film of the day and I was too tired to give it my full attention. I walked out right after Cate Blanchett’s character was introduced, excited to see the picture in full at the New York Film Festival. Then, last week, before I had a chance to do so, I read Larry Gross’ essay on I’m Not There in Film Comment. I wondered: is it a better use of our time to memorize the works of people like Godard and Debord, so that we can spot (and splooge over) those references when baby boomers of a certain intellectual standing plop them into movies, or would we be better off seeking out the Godards and Debords of our own time, so that in forty years we’ll be well equipped when they achieve cultural sainthood? I feel like I’ve been working on the latter for the last three or so years, but it’s fraught with disapointments. I might rather switch to the former––it seems easier, less emotional, more finite. A simple equation.

This could explain my failure to appreciate I’m Not There, insomuch as it amounts to an exercise in trotting out the dead corpse of the 60s one more time for a circle-jerk salute––to the point where at one point in the film, a corpse is actually trotted out in the middle of a public spectacle. Oh, I get it––if Haynes owns up to it, it’s self-referential, and that’s good. My apologies.

This film has its fans (such as our own Kevin), and for them I’ll post some audio from yesterday’s press conference with Haynes later today.