What's that blowin' in the wind?
Holy visions of Johanna. A new 'anti-biopic' about the many incarnations of Bob Dylan is shooting just as a new bout of Dylan fever spreads across the land.
MATTHEW HAYS

Special to The Globe and Mail


MONTREAL -- When director Todd Haynes and producer Christine Vachon decided to embark on a Bob Dylan-themed film project over two years ago, little did they know they'd be shooting the film at the very same time a serious wave of Dylan mania would break out.

After all, their filming of I'm Not There, a film inspired by the many different guises of Dylan, is but one of what seems like an almost endless list of books, musicals and exhibitions recently inspired by the man.

The film seems like another symptom of a singular virus that has spread throughout the cultural zeitgeist: Dylan Fever is upon us. (Insert obligatory line about wind a-blowin' here). Or maybe it's a full-fledged Dylan revival. Dylan's celebrated new chart-topping album Modern Times -- his 31st studio album -- was christened with (yet) another Rolling Stone magazine cover last month: "What we do understand, if we're listening, is that we're three albums into a Dylan renaissance that's sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work," wrote Jonathan Lethem in the cover story.

As well, there is Michael Gray's exhaustive 736-page Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, released in June; Jonathan Cott's anthology of conversations Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, published by Wenner Books in May; Greil Marcus's 2005 ode to the singer-songwriter Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, reissued in paperback in March; and Twyla Tharp's stage musical The Times They Are A-Changin', based on the music of Dylan, which premiered in January in San Diego.

Peter Landecker's stage musical Words & Music by Bob Dylan is now playing at the Brunswick House in Toronto; and Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966, billed as "the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to [the artist's] formative early career," runs until Jan. 6 at New York's prestigious Morgan Library and Museum (the show originated at Seattle's Experience Music Project and its last stop was Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where it opened on May 24, Dylan's birthday).

For Haynes and Vachon, the answer to the quandary of making a film about a life as awe-inspiring and intricate as the 65-year-old Dylan's has been to do the anti-biopic thing: Like Dylan himself, the script for I'm Not There (co-written by Haynes and Oren Moverman) is entirely unconventional, calling on six different actors to play characters inspired by different versions of the folk-rock icon -- Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw. (Additional cast members include Adrien Brody, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Michelle Williams.)

The film, which began shooting in late July, continues to shoot in Montreal until next Saturday. (Local actors in supporting roles include Jessica Kardos, Tim Post, Larry Day and Terry Haig.)

But Vachon, the producer behind such crucial independent films as I Shot Andy Warhol, Poison and Boys Don't Cry, warns that the six central actors "are not playing Dylan. That's the thing: I feel in some ways that when you see the film it'll all be clear, and I can't explain it before then. They're all playing characters who have something to do with the characters Dylan has played in his life. But nobody is named Bob."

Perhaps Haynes is making a nod to Todd Solondz's surreal, abortion-themed black comedy Palindromes (2004), in which seven different actors played the same young female character. Whatever the inspiration, the multiple-casting decision does perfectly reflect a crucial Dylanesque trait. As critic Rob Sheffield notes in a biography in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Dylan's "career is one archetype after another: the arrogant young protest singer in the Huck Finn cap; the mod Chelsea-booted hipster of the mid-sixties, singing the third verse of I Want You with all the deadly hip-twitching swing of Chuck Berry's guitar; the grizzled old con man of Love and Theft, croaking Biblical blues and Tin Pan Alley valentines out of the side of his mouth while keeping one eye on the exit."

And that, arguably the very essence of the constantly morphing Dylan persona, is precisely what drew filmmaker Haynes to Dylan as a subject. "The thing that really excited Todd the most about Dylan's life is the way in which he's created so many different identities," explains Vachon. "Not only would he just discard each identity, he would act as if the previous ones didn't exist. Even when his fans were upset because the singer that they had been so enamoured with had been replaced by another singer, it didn't matter. He kept carrying on. It's extraordinary."

Budgeted at $20-million, I'm Not There marks the fifth collaboration between Haynes and Vachon. Haynes is the visionary auteur whose Jean Genet-infused 1991 film Poison was at the vanguard of the then-emerging New Queer Cinema. Haynes has continued to startle and cajole complacent audiences with a series of challenging films that have made him a critical darling, including Safe (1995), his artful collapsing of literal illness and symbolic illness into one (which the Village Voice declared the best film of the entire 1990s); Velvet Goldmine (1998), his meditation on the glam-rock movement of the 1970s; and Far from Heaven (2002), his melancholic, Oscar-nominated reworking of the classic 1955 Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows.

Vachon says she can't recall how or when Haynes first approached her with the idea of a Dylan film. "We have worked together for so long, it's hard to say what the starting point for this project was. Todd is a pleasure to work with as a producer, because he's a real consummate filmmaker in every sense of the word. Every single thing in every single frame is there because he had a reason for it being there. There aren't that many filmmakers who can think as cinematically as he does."