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.

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