New York Times Magazine

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This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie

By ROBERT SULLIVAN
Published: October 7, 2007

You could begin the story of Todd Haynes’s Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven years ago, while Haynes was driving cross-country in his beat-up old Honda. But since Todd Haynes’s film about Dylan is as much about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan (or maybe even more); and since Haynes is a filmmaker who, in midcareer at age 46, is doing his best to take the experimental into the multiplex; and, further, since those who don’t like the film are likely to consider it a kind of gorgeous indulgence, a bizarre experiment, the temptation is to skip the ordinary narrative introduction and begin at the end, or very near the end, in this case in the last few days of filming, on the outskirts of Montreal, where, way in the back of a dark and cavernous and disused factory, there was a white glowing light, like something in a dream. We begin then with an image — an image that is all about, believe it or not, the relationship between Haynes and his film, between Dylan and Haynes, between the artist and the subject he is trying to portray.

Todd Haynes’s Dylan project is a biopic starring six people as Bob Dylan, or different incarnations of Bob Dylan, including a 13-year-old African-American boy, Marcus Carl Franklin, and an Australian woman, Cate Blanchett. It’s a biopic with a title that takes it name from one of the most obscure titles in the Dylan canon, a song available only as a bootleg, called “I’m Not There.” As I arrived at the set outside Montreal and pulled into a mud-swamped parking lot, disembarking and moving toward the great white light, I passed through the recreated past — namely the ’60s and ’70s. There was a sign for Folk City, for instance, and a fake cover for “Bringing It All Back Home,” a mock-up with the actress Cate Blanchett on it. There was a part of a bedroom from the ’70s and, on a nearby stand, a copy of “Les Illuminations,” by Arthur Rimbaud, the artist who seems to have inspired Dylan in his early days nearly as much as he inspired Todd Haynes. The book, the filmgoer will learn, shows up in a scene involving the ’70s superstar Dylan, a kind of jerk Dylan, played by Heath Ledger, who was just leaving the old factory: it was like a Grand Central Station of movie stars, as Ledger was on his way back to the Montreal apartment that he and the actress Michelle Williams had been staying in together for the past few weeks. Williams plays Coco Rivington, socialite, love interest of Blanchett’s Dylan, who is known in the film as Jude Quinn, the electric, rebellious Dylan.

The bright light, it turned out, was the set — a quasi-governmental interrogation scene that was, like a lot of other things in the film, never really explained — and Christian Bale was just stepping off. Bale’s Dylan is a slow-speaking folk-singer Dylan, the Dylan that seems to be searching and pondering. “In the film I’m playing a guy on a kind of fervent quest to find the truth,” Bale told me. He is one of the many people working on the film who has collaborated with Haynes before — in Bale’s case, in “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s homage to glam rock. So he was prepared, he said, for the audacity of the script, for so many Dylans, so many different kinds of films within one film. Whereas a lot of people in Hollywood said, “Did you read that script?” and scratched their heads, Bale was ready. “I started reading the script, and I just started to laugh,” Bale told me. He also likes the way a Haynes set works, even on this, his last day, where it all feels like the end of a race. “With Todd’s films, it’s a homegrown affair,” Bale says.

But back to the image of Todd Haynes, back to the long day, a rainy day, in a cold dark building, and into the bright blast of white light, where Haynes stepped toward the final Dylan to be filmed, the one dressed like Arthur Rimbaud, the Dylan that Haynes named Arthur, a teenage French symbolist poet, played by Ben Whishaw.

Whishaw was wearing a frayed 19th-century vest, coat and cravat. “white-wall interrogation of a teenage poet,” the screenplay explains. “weaves commentary and humor throughout the film.” Bale’s scenes are shot in 16-millimeter black and white, using old Kodak film stock, in a move for authenticity — Haynes even wanted the film in the film to look as if it were from the ’60s. Time is confused, mixed; the chronology is meant to be as it is in a Dylan song. This interrogation of a teenage 19th-century poet is supposed to be taking place around 1966.

Haynes looked intense. Off the set, he is loose, laughing, gesticulating wildly or rolling a cigarette. Here he was quiet and almost preternaturally calm.

Haynes was standing in for the interrogator. He stepped forward to fix the poet Dylan’s hair, adjusted his cravat, then read lines that Whishaw repeated. “A poem is like a naked person,” Haynes said. “Some call me a poet. . . . A song is something that walks by itself.”

Whishaw paused. “O.K., fidget a little,” Haynes said. The director read on. “We just wish to make inquiries,” he intoned. “Are you an illegal alien?”

“No,” the poet replied.

“Are you an enemy combatant?”

“No.”

Let’s not bother with what it all means. No one on set seemed to know for sure; they all pretty much trust Haynes that it means something. Let’s focus on the camera, which Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, had lined up for a final shot of the 19th-century Dylan, a mug-shot view of the head, with the same shot of all the other Dylans, a set of Dylan mug shots accumulated over the month and a half of shooting. Together these head shots will eventually become the opening of the film: all the Dylans presented as a team, a six-actor composite. Flashing on the video monitor in Lachman’s wax-pencil-drawn cross hairs were Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin. Whishaw’s Dylan was aligned and then filmed, after which the crew broke.

Then Haynes took Whishaw’s seat on the empty set and, in the video monitor, happened to perfectly align his head with those of all of his Dylans. When I stepped from the wings to look through the camera itself, I saw, in one semimystical, semirevealing moment, the artist as one with the artist he was trying to artificially reassemble.

Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan. “These so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music, I don’t feel they know a thing or have any inkling of who I am or what I’m about,” Dylan himself told an interviewer in 2001. “It’s ludicrous, humorous and sad that such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life please. . . . You’re wasting you own.” It might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating on Haynes’s part, but to make sense in a film about Dylan would make no sense. “If I told you what our music is really about, we’d probably all get arrested,” Dylan once said.

“I don’t know that it does make sense,” Cate Blanchett says of the film, “and I don’t know whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you in kind of some other place. It might make sense when you’re half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live. I don’t think the film even strives to make sense, in a way.”

Richard Gere, who plays the Dylan of later years, a Billy the Kid Dylan who ran away to some other place, another time, tends to agree. “It has an emotional truth to it, which is what I think modern art is about,” he says. “It’s not about the narrative. In other words, without narrative, it’s kind of, well, cosmic.” (Note: Gere, a Dylan fan, considers himself friendly with Dylan. “It’s impossible to think of a world without ‘Visions of Johanna,’ ” he told me, kidding only a little.) “And that’s obviously what Dylan’s work is about,” Gere went on to say. “And I think kind of miraculously, Todd was able to tap into that.”

Emotional truth is not something that you hear a lot about in Hollywood story meetings. You hear about arcs, you hear about beats and structure. The standard biopic takes a musician and shows his ups and downs, with the happy music in good times, the sad music in bad; it locks him into an identity. With his biopic, Haynes was looking for another way, avoiding straight narrative and leaning toward montage: six short impressionistic pieces almost jury-rigged together. At the most basic level, he has tried to make a film with the power to carry you away, the power of a song, and what he is asking of the audience is to relinquish control, which is, of course, a huge gamble. “You have to give up a certain amount of control when you listen to music,” Haynes told me. He wanted to get back to what it meant when Dylan went electric, when he ran away to Woodstock and recorded the oldest, craziest American songs. “What would it be like to be in that moment when it was new and dangerous and different?” Haynes says. “You have to do a kind of trick almost to get people back to where Dylan did what he did or Mozart did what he did.” Haynes didn’t want to make a movie about anything. He wanted to make a movie that is something.

And what he started with was that emotional truth, in this case, just a feeling, a feeling that he had in the car while escaping New York, a feeling that was messing around with the interior monologue of a New York filmmaker who was leaving his small apartment in Williamsburg for a new life. It was a feeling churned up by song — a Dylan song, “She’s Your Lover Now.” That’s what got him going on Dylan, which could be tough to explain to studio executives.

Which, of course, is why “I’m Not There,” took seven years to make. It isn’t easy telling the money men that Marcus Carl Franklin, the African-American 13-year-old, will play Woody, Haynes’s version of the young Dylan, a kind of teenage hobo as Woody Guthrie, while Christian Bale will play Jack Rollins, Haynes’s folk Dylan, the truth-singing protest singer, who transforms into Pastor John, an evangelical preacher. That Cate Blanchett, playing Jude Quinn, will try to capture the 1966 suddenly rock-star Dylan who was Judas to his folk-loving fans. Haynes thought he had earned some artistic capital with the Oscar nominations for his previous film, “Far From Heaven,” but it took his producers five years to raise nearly $20 million to make the film — not a huge budget, certainly, but big for an independent film, and big for an independent film that some will argue is one man’s obsession, a Dylan-trivia-fueled dream. Haynes is the first nondocumentary filmmaker ever to have secured the rights to Dylan’s life and music, what some people would consider a filmmaker’s chance for big commercial profit, but his script, rather than a straightforward depiction of a man and his guitar, was a combination of film styles and cosmic nonsequiturs. While he was waiting for cash to come through, actors came and went. Locations were chosen and then abandoned. One studio picked it up and then dropped it three years later. Haynes didn’t finally find a distributor until last December, six years in, when the Weinstein Company bought it. Then rumors swirled that he was on the verge of losing that distributor when Harvey Weinstein actually saw the first cut of the film this spring. And really, who could blame the skeptics? Even Haynes himself told me last month, “This film really shouldn’t hold up.”

In 1987, when Haynes was 26, he began the first film that the public really noticed, though he’d been making films since grade school. It was a film about Karen Carpenter called “Superstar,” with Barbie and Ken dolls as Karen and Richard Carpenter, the ’70s pop duo. A pseudo-documentary made while Haynes was an M.F.A. student at Bard College (he’d earned his undergraduate degree at Brown, where he studied art and semiotics), “Superstar” is intercut with grainy video images of the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, spankings. To represent Karen’s anorexia, Haynes carved away the doll’s face as the film unfolded. It’s an intellectual exercise about roles and societal pressures, and its reception was characteristic of all Haynes’s films. Academics loved it. “It begins as brazen mockery but as its understanding of the social and cultural constructions of Karen’s illness widens, it takes on a bitter poignancy,” James Morrison wrote recently in the introduction to “The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows.” “Superstar” was also an underground hit, shown in museums and clubs, until Haynes received a cease-and-desist order from Richard Carpenter, a legal move that helped make it what Entertainment Weekly described as one of the Top 50 cult films of all time.

Around that time, Haynes was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and had been a founding member of Gran Fury, the artists’ collective of Act Up, the militant AIDS activist group. With Christine Vachon, a Brown classmate, he ran Apparatus Productions, an incubator of short independent films that eventually produced Haynes’s first feature film, “Poison.” “Poison” established Haynes as a leader of what came to be known as New Queer Cinema, a short-lived movement that was as significant for the gay-themed stories it told as for the way in which it told them — from a gay point of view, for example, or a feminist point of view. “Poison,” an art film with three interwoven stories (an AIDS-inspired horror film, a mock TV documentary and a Jean Genet-esque story of a homoerotic experience at a French prison), won the grand jury prize at Sundance. More infamously, because Haynes had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, it was taken up by Congressional Republicans and conservative commentators, who called it “filth” and gay porn. It proved, among other things, to be a big nail in the coffin of publicly financed art films.

In Haynes’s third film, “Safe,” Julianne Moore starred as a suburban woman with an undiagnosable environmental illness. It’s partly a horrifyingly intense study of suburbia (Wes Craven called it the scariest film of 1995), partly a metaphorical look at the AIDS epidemic. Unlike the multi-narrative “Poison,” “Safe” tells a straight-ahead story. But it’s suffused with nods to the history of film — the opening, for instance, is an allegorical nod to Fassbinder’s “Chinese Roulette,” the German filmmaker’s study of the bourgeoisie. At the time, Haynes’s lover, Jim Lyons, was ill with AIDS, and Haynes visited him in the hospital in the mornings before working on the set. “I know people who wanted to become filmmakers after they saw ‘Safe,’ ” says Oren Moverman, the screenwriter who helped write “I’m Not There.” “I can give names.”

Then came “Velvet Goldmine,” another montage, a love letter to glam rock (the film’s title is taken from a David Bowie B-side) that Haynes expected to be both his artistic masterpiece and a commercial success — the melding of smart and popular being Todd Haynes’s dream. But it turned out to be neither. The first blow came when David Bowie refused to grant any song rights. Then Haynes faced nine months of script rewrites. And finally, it received mixed reviews — some thought it was maddening, others thought it was brilliant, still others thought it was both — and had a weak showing at the box office. “I just kept thinking I should be having the time of my life making this film, and I wasn’t,” Haynes recalls.

“Velvet Goldmine” is also significant in that Harvey Weinstein, then at Miramax, was a producer on the film and distributed it. Haynes says that Weinstein told him that the movie had structural problems and was too long. He appealed to Haynes to make changes, but Haynes had already been cutting and making changes for months and resisted. Haynes was also unhappy about the distribution of the film; Weinstein intended to market it as a Cannes winner, but the film didn’t win any major prizes at the festival. Haynes and his allies maintain that Weinstein abandoned the film after that. Their relationship strained further during the awards process, when Weinstein upset Haynes by not campaigning for the film’s costume designers in the Oscar competition. “When ‘Velvet Goldmine’ came out, Miramax was behind it in only the most perfunctory way,” Christine Vachon wrote in her book, “A Killer Life,” named after her production company, Killer Films. “In Harvey’s mind there was a commercial movie in there, but Todd refused to unearth it.”

After “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes went into a deep funk that lasted a long while. “ ‘Velvet Goldmine’ almost killed him,” says his friend Kelly Reichardt, who was a set dresser on “Poison” and won the Los Angeles Film Critics experimental-film award for “Old Joy,” for which Haynes served as executive producer.

And this is where the Dylan story begins, when Haynes is down. “I’ve heard this from other people, that he crops up in life, in times of crisis,” Haynes told me. By he, Haynes means Dylan. Haynes had another movie in his head, and he was about to go to Portland, Ore., where his sister lived, to write “Far From Heaven,” which would be his first box-office success. The film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, is a tribute to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, starring Julianne Moore as a picture-perfect 1950s housewife who discovers that her husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is gay; she subsequently falls in love with a black man, played by Dennis Haysbert. Academics saw it as a play on Fassbinder’s “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” a 1974 film that pointed to Sirk’s melodramas not as mere entertainments for so-called housewives but as a penetrating critique of the roles that society forces us to play.

This idea of changing identity is also where Haynes hooked into the idea of a Dylan film, one that would not even feature the words Bob or Dylan. It wasn’t just the music that got Haynes, though he was loving it. “I just found this refusal to be fixed as a single self in a single voice as a key to his freedom,” Haynes told me. “And he somehow escaped this process of being frozen into one fixed person.”

The standard kind of biopic bored Haynes. “A biopic is always weaving these overdetermined moments with these moments we don’t know,” Haynes says. “Ray Charles at the piano, Ray Charles at home.” Early on, Haynes ran across this line in the Anthony Scaduto biography of Dylan: “He created a new identity every step of the way in order to create identity.” It was the eureka moment for “I’m Not There,” a way to build a film with different perspectives, with polyphonic voices. He called Christine Vachon at Killer Films. He needed the rights this time, having been badly burned on rights to music, first with “Superstar” and then with “Velvet Goldmine,” even when Harvey Weinstein appealed to David Bowie for the rights to one song. “I don’t want to go through that again,” Haynes told Vachon. She suggested he wait to write. He busied himself with preproduction for “Far From Heaven.”

Creative Artists Agency suggested that Vachon talk to Jesse Dylan, the film director and eldest son of Bob Dylan and his first wife, Sara. Vachon recalls: “What he did was say: ‘Look, this is the guy you have to talk to. He is my father’s right hand.’ ” In a few minutes, Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s longtime representative, was on speakerphone; in another multi-Dylan biopic, Rosen might be the smart businessman Dylan. Vachon remembers that Rosen was immediately interested (both he and Dylan declined to be interviewed for this article). “He was like: ‘You know, that sounds really cool. We’re always thinking about a way, something that, you know, kind of collects the music.’ ”

Haynes was instructed to send all his films to Rosen. Dylan was about to begin a tour. Dylan, he was told, loves watching movies on the bus. Haynes was further instructed to type up his idea. In telling him how to go about writing up his idea, Haynes recalls, both Jesse Dylan and Jeff Rosen mostly told him what not to do. “ ‘Don’t use “genius,” ’ they said. ‘Don’t use “voice of a generation,” ’ they said, and they were sort of like, don’t use his name, and don’t use music,” Haynes remembers. He was told not to write more than one page.

Haynes felt certain that he had an idea of what Dylan liked, as far as films went. “I had heard enough,” Haynes said. “I knew he liked Fassbinder.” (Martin Scorsese says that in the ’70s, Dylan first told him to check out the Fassbinder film “Beware of a Holy Whore.”)

Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote, Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan were both familiar with. It was a quote that if he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have killed the project: “I is another.” Then came the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: “If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.” (A seventh Dylan, Charlie, “the ‘little tramp’ of Greenwich Village,” was eventually cut.)

“It sounds like a thesis statement,” Haynes says now, though it also sounds exactly like Todd Haynes. To hang out with Haynes is to hang out with a guy who can drop words like “interiority” and “recontextuality” and maybe even convince someone that he’s missing out if he hasn’t read Foucault, but who can also enthusiastically recommend the latest hyper-cool band, especially if it has just passed through Portland. “Last night I saw the Blow at Holecene,” he said to me once, “and, dude, I totally recommend you check them out.”

Haynes sent the pitch off in the summer of 2000. That fall, he heard that Dylan had said yes.

For Todd Haynes, Portland was a tonic. It’s a lo-fi town, a do-it-yourselfer’s paradise, a place where, in contrast to New York, your career is not necessarily everything. “When I moved to Portland, I was more social and productive than I’d ever been in my entire life,” Haynes says. “I remember being at an opening, talking to Gus, and people were just saying, ‘Hey Todd!’ ‘Hey Todd!’ I just felt available, and I loved that feeling. In New York, if someone came and knocked on your door without telling you, you’d be like, ‘Get out.’ ” Gus is Gus Van Sant, the director, who also lives in Portland.

“I think he ran into a lot of people he really liked,” Van Sant says. “They weren’t really encumbered by all the ambition in New York and L.A.” Haynes made friends with writers and artists, people like Jon Raymond, an editor of the magazine Plazm and a novelist whom he had asked to assist him on the New York-area set of “Far From Heaven.” (For one issue of Plazm, Haynes posed in a Bigfoot suit, no one apparently telling him how dangerous it is to run around in the woods of the Pacific Northwest in a Bigfoot suit with so many armed Bigfoot hunters running around.) He went river-swimming. He hung out at Berlin Inn, a brauhaus on the east side. “He could have been on the chamber of commerce,” Van Sant says.

Haynes bought an old Arts and Crafts bungalow. He planted a garden, painted, got out his guitar and played some Dylan songs. “Portland was this green city, this place of resurgence and rebirth,” his sister, Wendy, says. Portland was also a cheap city, or cheaper than New York, which is a big weapon in the arsenal Haynes uses to make films. “He lives in a modest way and that is ultimately very powerful, because he’s kind of incorruptible,” says Randall Poster, the music supervisor on “Velvet Goldmine” and on “I’m Not There” and a classmate of Haynes’s from Brown. “And he has people by his side who will kill for him. These movies are very hard, and it’s a long road, but it’s ultimately very fulfilling.”

The nation went to war, and Haynes went to the Oscars, and then all through the fall of 2003, he read everything about Dylan he could find. He read the biographies and the studies. He studied the bootlegs. He read Greil Marcus’s story of American culture, “The Old, Weird America,” a book rooted in the music Dylan made in Woodstock in 1967 with members of the Band and later released as “The Basement Tapes.”

Haynes generally makes films one of two ways: either with a story line or as a collage of ideas; the latter he once compared to painting while high. “I used to love getting stoned, playing music, getting lost in that canvas and not knowing what it was going to be,” he has said. The Dylan movie, he determined, would be that kind of film. He clipped photos, painted paintings, made cards filled with quotes from Dylan, from the Old Testament, the New Testament. “I will open my mouth in parables,” Haynes copied down from the Gospel of Matthew. “I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” He copied down pages and pages of quotes from social commentaries, from folk songs, from Dylan songs. In one of his notebooks, under the heading “governing concepts/themes,” he wrote: “America obsessed with authenticity/authenticity the perfect costume/America the land of masks, costumes, self-transformation, creativity is artificial, America’s about false authenticity and creativity.” For Robbie, Heath Ledger’s Dylan, whose on-screen marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg) fails, he wrote, “A relationship doomed to a long stubborn protraction (not unlike Vietnam, which it parallels).” The notes themselves can seem like a great cache of insider art, printed out with nice fonts, with colors and graphics, reeking of time spent cramming. “I feel like anytime I’ll work on a film, it’s like a giant dissertation, a gigantic undertaking, and this is probably the biggest one,” Haynes told me. “Probably the Ph.D.”

In the fall of 2003, when the script was nearly done, Haynes called in Oren Moverman, a screenwriter whom he had consulted early on, to help him finish. Haynes’s instructions were Talmudic. “He kept saying, ‘We’re not writing a screenplay; we’re interpreting,’ ” Moverman recalls. At some point, Haynes wondered whether he could pull it all off, such a wacky montage of Dylans. He called Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s right hand, who was watching the deal-making but staying out of the scriptwriting. Rosen, he said, told him not to worry, that it was just his own crazy version of what Dylan is.

Finally, by the beginning of 2004, Haynes’s script was ready, but Hollywood wasn’t. People wanted to see it, because of Todd Haynes, because of Dylan, but that still wasn’t enough. Paramount picked up the film in 2002, before Haynes had even written the script, because of interest in Haynes from John Goldwyn, who was then running the studio. At one point, it was going to be shot in Romania, to save money. Meanwhile, Haynes carried on with life in Portland, flying the three hours to L.A. for meetings, helping Kelly Reichardt with her film “Old Joy,” which was based on a short story by his friend Jon Raymond, which featured Tanya Smith, Haynes’s assistant. “He gets involved in all his friends’ work,” Reichardt says.

The Dylan script, meanwhile, was with Laura Rosenthal, who had been his casting director since she approached Haynes after seeing “Safe.” “It’s an incredibly fulfilling relationship,” she says. “He’s a control freak but a nice control freak.” He called Rosenthal the day after he sent it to her. “I said, ‘Give me a second — I need more time,’ ” Rosenthal says. She was skeptical. “I didn’t think it could ever be realized,” she says. But she was up for it. She sent it out to actors. “Because it was so cool, the phone didn’t stop ringing,” she says.

Actors came and went in the years that passed; Colin Farrell and Adrien Brody were on then off because of commitments. Investors seemed to smell niche audience. Goldwyn was replaced as the head of Paramount, which subsequently let the movie go. But by the spring of 2006, his producers finally put together financing for the film with foreign sales and a large stake by Endgame Entertainment, a small but expanding entertainment firm headed by a Dylan fan named Jim Stern. “Because of my vast store of Dylan knowledge, I was able to follow it,” Stern says. The foreign sales came after Cate Blanchett met with Haynes, on the morning of the Oscars in 2005, when she won the best supporting actress for “The Aviator.”

“He was the reason I wanted to be involved in the project,” Blanchett told me. “And it’s very rare that you read a script that is as impenetrable as this was, because it was completely and utterly inside Todd’s brain. He’d worked out every shot, every juxtaposition of image. It was really like a operatic score, there were so many instruments playing.” At breakfast before the Oscars, he showed her pictures. “I think he was really smart in getting a woman to play Dylan,” she said. She saw it as relieving pressure on the film. “I think it’s the most externally iconic image of Dylan — when he went electric and that tour — and if a guy had been playing, you would have been looking too closely for the Dylanisms,” she told me. How did he finally win her over to the role? “We talked about hair a lot,” she said.

Richard Gere signed on early, too. When Haynes visited Gere’s place in March 2005, Gere had just read about Dylan’s favorite version of “Positively Fourth Street,” by Johnny Rivers, and he put it on as Haynes came in, the two of them lying on the floor listening to it. Gere gave Haynes a book of pictures by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a photographer whose mask imagery would make it into the Richard Gere sections. Haynes sent CDs of Dylan songs to the cast members. As James Joyce circulated annotations of the inscrutable “Ulysses” (for his friends to publish under their own names), so Haynes, on the production team’s behalf, put together a key to all the Dylans, to the films within the film.

If you were visiting the set of “I’m Not There” and it had not yet hit you that each Dylan would have his own film, filmed in a thematically appropriate style, then it would probably have become clear the day you saw Cate Blanchett looking more like Dylan than Dylan himself, standing alongside one of those swan-shaped Italian modern chairs that graced the famous spa set of Fellini’s “8 1/2.” If you wanted to feel a little Felliniesque to boot, you could note that Blanchett spent her breaks staring into a book of Dylan interviews, the cover of which looked just like her looking like him. “She’s embodied this creature,” Haynes told me later. “She blew everybody away.”

At some point, Haynes would sit you down and show you that Blanchett’s Dylan was filmed in a Fellini-style black and white (slow motion sequences to be added later on); that Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid Dylan would be shot like a late-’60s, early-’70s Western (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” or “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”); that Bale’s born-again Dylan would be filmed in the bad-TV video that befits a Sacramento, Calif., church basement; that Ledger’s rock-star Dylan would feature the wide shots and close ups of objects that characterize Godard. As Dylan stole song and lyric styles — from the Clancy Brothers, from Civil War poets — so the film cops different Dylan-era directorial styles.

“I said to Todd before we started filming, ‘What’s the “8 1/2” stuff?’ ” Blanchett told me. “ ‘Is it part Dylan, part Mastroianni?’ And he said, ‘No, no, it’s just a film that I thought of for each section.’ I mean, he had a film for each sort of leaping-off point. I mean, that’s what I love, the structure of the film, it dips out of the present and the past, of fantasy and reality, but in that particular sequence, within seconds, within one story.”

Like Blanchett, Lachman, the cinematographer (who has worked with Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh and Wim Wenders, among others), quizzed Haynes about his choice of film styles. “He said that the obvious thing would have been to use the style of D. A. Pennebaker’s ‘Don’t Look Back,’ but if you listen to what Dylan was saying at the time, it wasn’t about being in rooms with bandmembers; he was being Felliniesque with his prose,” Lachman says. “It’s all this imagery. So what better filmmaker than Fellini? What better film than ‘8 1/2,’ which is about a filmmaker being hounded?”

It’s probably not a bad analogy for how Blanchett felt on the set. For one thing, she was negotiating the fact that sometimes she was speaking composed dialogue, other times reciting actual interviews, especially a 1966 interview Dylan did with Nat Hentoff in Playboy. “That’s why it was so tricky to play that scene, because it is from an interview,” Blanchett says. “But Dylan’s obviously riffing, finding that stuff in the moment. And it’s the difference between doing that, and also knowing that this is a reference to something that has already been said. So it was very difficult to play because you were constantly aware that you were in the immediacy of the moment but yet referencing primary, tertiary and secondary sources — the whole Dewey system was crashing in on me.”

And then there were the constant logistical strains. The cast and all its stars raced around from place to place — 70 locations in Montreal in 49 days, an insane schedule, money always a looming question. “It was touch and go pretty much the whole time we were filming,” Blanchett says. “Films like this just don’t get made all the time. That in itself is extraordinary. You know, I’ve seen a couple of really amazing Thai films shot in video that don’t really get a release. But for a film to have Heath Ledger in it and Christian Bale and Richard Gere and to be verging on mainstream cinema — I mean, that’s kind of a major achievement in and of itself.”

When filming was finally over, Haynes went to Hawaii for 10 days, and then to his house in Portland, to the TV room, just off the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of a flat-screen TV, which was also sitting on the floor, with glasses, a box of tissues, tea and lots of crystallized ginger, for the immune system. He had the stacks of dailies beside him. “I’m just trying to see what I have,” he told me at the time. He made page after page of notes, which were then carried by Tanya Smith, his assistant, to the editor, Jay Rabinowitz, on the other side of Portland. All previous films by Haynes had been edited by his former boyfriend, Jim Lyons, an AIDS activist and screenwriter who was still in New York. Rabinowitz, who had met Haynes through Oren Moverman, is the editor on most of Jim Jarmusch’s films, including “Night on Earth” and “Broken Flowers.” He is also a Dylan fan. In the back of the ramshackle room where he edited the film, Rabinowitz kept a mini-Dylan shrine, part jest, part talisman. The centerpiece was a painting by Haynes of Dylan. Nearby, Rabinowitz kept track of the daily set list when Dylan was on tour. “You know, I love to edit with music anyway, and I have worked on films with Neil Young, with Tom Waits, with Joe Strummer,” Rabinowitz told me. “But to go to work every day and to edit, which I love, and to listen to Bob Dylan’s music — I mean, it’s the best job I ever had in my life.”

One night in early December last year, Haynes went out to dinner at Bluehour, a bright star in the Portland food constellation. Killer Films had sent out a reel to distributors, just a sampling of scenes, a few days before. That night, Harvey Weinstein bought it. Now, once the rough cut was ready, it would go to Weinstein; it was clear that Haynes was a little nervous about it. They had argued over “Velvet Goldmine,” and Haynes knew that Weinstein wanted the film soon, to take it to Cannes in May. “I will not be rushed at this point,” Haynes told me that night.

Still, for the next three months, Haynes hibernated with his film, Rabinowitz editing by day, Haynes coming in at night. By Valentine’s Day, they had a rough cut. Haynes knew the film was long at nearly three hours, but he thought he was close. He was thinking about the final edits on “Velvet Goldmine.” “My only regret is that I was too brutal about it,” he told me. “ ‘Make it tighter. Make it flow,’ they were saying. And I should have just let it go.”

He started to see parallels between his battle and Dylan’s, the battle to be uncompromising in your art yet still find commercial success, to make the world bend to your vision. “He maintained an incredible popularity, and he made popular culture come to him,” Haynes told me. “He did. He raised the bar, and I have tried to do that.”

In the early spring, Harvey Weinstein would see the cut for the first time, in New York. When it was over, Weinstein had a lot of problems. Basically, he didn’t seem to get the film. According to Haynes, Weinstein did not think the Billy the Kid Dylan, played by Richard Gere, worked — in fact, most people told Haynes that — and said that the movie was confusing in general. Rumors circulated that Weinstein planned to drop the movie altogether. “I think that in this movie there are scenes and episodes that are amongst the best filmmaking that has taken place in American film — I mean you can go that singular on it,” Weinstein told me recently. “That’s how accomplished Todd is as a director. I think there are sections of this that flow easily. There are other sections that are going to be a little bit bumpy.” But at that moment, Haynes says, Weinstein wanted a lot of those sections changed or, as in the case of the Richard Gere parts, cut.

Their contract gave Haynes control over the final cut, but over the next few weeks he made small changes and cuts, bringing the film down to two and a half hours. But the essence of the film remained the same. To some extent, Haynes knew what he was getting into with Weinstein, and vice versa. “Harvey told me he didn’t want it to get personal, which I respect,” Haynes said.

A week later, Haynes had another screening in Portland, inviting his friends. Jon Raymond, the novelist, was there, loving it, while Raymond’s father complained about how boring it was. It was generally a positive response; Haynes was hearing the things he’d hoped to hear. He e-mailed me afterward: “Watched the cut Saturday night with Jon Raymond and Tanya, while 7 other friends and colleagues watched it in NY. & based on their reactions and my own ability to sort of see it through ‘fresh’ eyes, I think for the first time in four years those looming clouds of doubt and catastrophe have parted. . . . I realized that I don’t have to ‘sell it’ anymore, that ultimately the film is what it is — & there’s no turning it into something else. And what it is is like nothing else: both intimate and panoramic, the story of a personality and a nation (I think it’s a deeply patriotic movie). It’s rich & literate but it’s very moving and fun. Tanya and Jon and I talked about it for several hours & later Jon wrote: ‘Tell them (when they ask you what your movie is “about”) that it’s no less than a history of American conscience and American soul (at a moment when both those things are in serious question). It’s a movie about Bob Dylan as the president of America.’ ”

Weinstein decided to do a test screening in New York in May. On one side of the aisle sat Harvey Weinstein. On the other side sat Todd Haynes. Laura Rosenthal, the casting director; Oren Moverman, the screenwriter; Jay Rabinowitz, the editor; and Christine Vachon, the producer, sat in the back, along with Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s representative. The rest of the place was filled with focus-group attendees. The film, a little shorter, was shown but without effects or credits. At the end, the industry people in the back rows were joking about an Allen Ginsberg scene in which he suggests that Dylan sold out to God. Then came the questioning. It felt like a psychic face-off: Weinstein hunched forward, Haynes leaning back.

“O.K., how many people didn’t like the ending?” the screening leader said. Answers ran along the lines of “wasn’t very smooth,” “neutral,” “unclear.” The psychic edge went to Weinstein’s side of the aisle. Then a phrase caused whispers and nods on the Haynes side: “One of the best biopics ever.”

People filled out forms rating the film. “Far From Heaven” had scored 18 out of 100 for good reactions at its test screening, and now “I’m Not There” came in at 45, the highest score Haynes had ever received. Length, confusion and Gere’s Billy the Kid Dylan were all “consensus negatives,” to use the industry term. Haynes says that Weinstein predicted dire consequences for the film if changes weren’t made. (Weinstein denies this.)

Haynes went back to Portland and cut some more, eventually bringing the film down to two hours and 15 minutes. Then he headed out to L.A. for two weeks of sound mixing.

In Los Angeles one morning in June, Haynes, Rabinowitz, Perri Pivovar, the assistant editor, and Tanya Smith, Haynes’s assistant, were all putting the final touches on the film — and adding the dedication, to Jim Lyons, Haynes’s former boyfriend and film editor, who had died of from AIDS-related illnesses weeks earlier. “We cut this,” Haynes said, as he watched a Cate Blanchett scene of hallucinatory spectacle. “Jay and I were ignoring notes about it for three months. But we finally cut it when Cate said we should. Not that I do everything cause Cate says to.”

“You kind of do,” Smith said.

“No, I don’t,” Haynes said.

“You kind of do,” Rabinowitz said.

That afternoon, they were back in the sound studio. There were details to discuss.

“They want it to say based on the life of Bob Dylan,” Smith told Haynes.

“Tell them it’s inspired by,” Haynes said.

They’d been in Los Angeles for a week. Already that day they fiddled with the basement gospel band as Christian Bale sang “Pressing On,” turned up a wind sound effect during a Richard Gere scene and even adjusted the guitar of Dylan himself, playing “Idiot Wind.” They had also spent the better part of two hours trying to match Dylan’s harmonica in a 1965 Manchester Hall film to a bootleg.

Later in the afternoon, Haynes finally got his hands on the master recording of “I’m Not There.” Neil Young’s office had e-mailed it over. (Dylan’s people had accidentally given it to Young in 1968.)

“We’d been looking for it all this time, if you can believe it,” Haynes said.

Haynes was loose, loopy even. At the end of the day, the crew and even his folks came to celebrate with cake. Haynes talked about how tired he was. He looked dead. “I need to get a life,” he said.

“It feels strange to be like this,” Haynes told me on a summer afternoon in July in Portland. By “this” he meant not working on “I’m Not There.” “This” meant a late breakfast at Fuller’s, an old Portland breakfast place, or vintage shopping with Tanya Smith to get a suit for the Venice film festival. It meant watching Lifetime movies with his boyfriend, Bryan O’Keefe, who had just returned from China, where he was teaching English. Not making a film is not something Haynes is very good at, of course, and his friends realized that he has an idea for a film brewing, that it has to do with politics and the war. “If I’m lucky enough to get great writers and great resources to show what really happened in the march to war and with domestic spying and torture, then I will,” he said. “And if other people beat me to it, that’s O.K., but I will take my time.”

Two weeks later, he’d broken down, at Smith’s urging, and bought a new suit, which he wore to the world premiere in Venice early last month. On a party on a boat the night before the premiere, Haynes was feeling queasy. Harvey Weinstein was excited; he had already announced that he would get Blanchett an Oscar nomination or kill himself. And he had already come up with a distribution plan that would start in small art houses and expand slowly. He was hoping to have Greil Marcus write liner notes to be distributed at viewings. He was still sounding a little nervous. “Whatever people are going to say about this, they’re going to have say that it’s daring,” Weinstein told me just before Venice. “Nothing’s ever been attempted like this before.”

As the credits rolled after the Venice premiere, the audience gave the film a 10-minute standing ovation. “That’s a long time,” Christine Vachon said. “Clock it on your watch.”

Haynes was overwhelmed. “I was like, ‘Who are they clapping for?’ ”

“I think people don’t realize how emotional he is,” Julianne Moore, who plays the Joan Baez figure in “I’m Not There,” had told me earlier. “He’s really trying to work out what it means to be a human being and what it means to live in the world.”

That night, living in the world meant a dinner party at the hotel that went late, and everyone, for one brief moment, loved the film that they used to think couldn’t be made, maybe every confounding aspect.

The next day, Haynes went to the ocean and came back with a scene description that was less like an experimental film and more like one of those Lifetime movies. “I just dove into the waves and I came up in the sea and the sky was half-light and half-cloudy and it was just amazing,” he told me. He was elated. “I can take all the I don’t really get its now,” he went on. For a moment, anyway, it was a real Hollywood ending.