I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Upon its release, I'm Not There struck me as a hollow experiment, a nifty "what-if" but nothing more. Not helping matters, certainly, was my own lack of familiarity with Bob Dylan, a sacred cow whose enigmatic profile (as evidenced by this fragmentary "biopic") split into so many personalities that I never knew how to approach him. For all its dazzling formal techniques, I'm Not There frustrated me for doing nothing, it seemed, to explore Dylan's real personality. Its much-ballyhooed division of Dylan's various artistic reinventions into separate roles for different actors was its greatest weakness.

Of course, Bob Dylan's refusal to be defined as any one thing but Bob Dylan (and sometimes not even that), is what has made him endure as much as a mystery as a legend. Haynes does not attempt to "solve" Dylan, and if I'm Not There ultimately concludes that there may be no real Dylan under all those smokescreens, it nevertheless paints a compelling portrait—well, collage—of a man who exists wholly within pop culture. The trait that links the six characters representing Dylan's personae is a hint of persecution by those who love him, of devotion and mistrust displayed in equal measure. Even the earliest incarnation of Dylan, a mere child faces hardship, even if he has to invent some of it.

That child (Marcus Carl Franklin), who calls himself Woody Guthrie represents Dylan's beginnings as an ambitious folkie who drifted out of the Midwest as if a dissatisfied spirit of the Depression spat him out at the turn of the '60s. But by casting an African-American as the boy, Haynes begins a subtle but consistent critique of Dylan's public image wrapped up in the loving tribute. Woody spins all kinds of tall tales as a backstory to the families and hobos he meets riding the rails across the country, stories that appropriate misery and strife to make his life more compelling. Yet the child actor's race is the biggest appropriation of all, the artist who would become the ultimate in white liberal hipness seeing himself as a poor black kid at heart in a too-forward sense of identification with the truly downtrodden.

Yet the leap from this child, introduced circa 1959, to actors pushing 30, if not already past the line, could be seen as a respectful view of the artist's rapid maturity. Christian Bale takes the baton from Franklin to play Jack Rollins, the Dylan who erupted in Greenwich Village as the superstar of the '60s folk scene. The difference between the two characters is as vast as the gulf between Dylan's self-titled debut, filled mostly with passable covers of folk standards and his sophomore effort, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, such an instant, out-of-nowhere classic many still believe it is his true first album. Franklin's Woody, naïve and romanticizing the past, is the only character younger than Dylan was in each respective career phase, but Bale emerges a man of the moment, crystallizing the social ills of the day rather than hiding out in the past. Even so, Dylan is still a young man, barely over 20 when he becomes a cause célèbre and not yet 25 when he sends shockwaves through his devoted fanbase. He may have the voice of a man who has lived lifetimes, but he is still barely an adult.

Nowhere is this blend of maturity and youth more strikingly displayed than in Cate Blanchett's performance as Dylan's "going electric" avatar, Jude Quinn. This period of Dylan's life has been documented more than any other, a fact Haynes does not even attempt to hide as his grainy black-and-white stock and verité style recalls D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. That film showed off a combative, evasive boy sneering at the press (and fans) who hung on his every word. Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, looks at that same material from a retrospective angle, clarifying Dylan's seeming aggressiveness as the result of his unwillingness to be the voice of a generation, with all the baggage that would bring.

Not even the real Dylan, however, brings as much sobering insight into his younger self's belligerence as Blanchett. The actress' agelessness here serves as a trap for Jude. Wearing Dylan's black sunglasses, Blanchett plays Jude as peevish and vulgar, being outlandish just to get a rise out of those who feel he owes them something. But Blanchett's jittery leg twitching and head jerking suggest amphetamine addiction. The illicit substance keeps Jude going through his concentrated period of artistic fertility; the three album stretch Jude personifies is perhaps the most radical evolution of pop songcraft of the 20th century. It also leaves Jude strung out and nervous, his already apparent discomfort with superstardom exacerbated by a lack of sleep and an overstimulated brain. Jude takes off his glasses regularly, but one shot in particular, situated at the film's end, holds on Blanchett's face as she looks with uncovered eyes into the camera, lines practically forming around her eyes as her deflated, neutral facial expression communicates an endless weariness. It is ravaging enough to be either Jesus or Judas. Dylan at this time was both, and as Blanchett's Jude ages in that late shot, the motorcycle crash that Dylan fans know is right around the corner could almost been seen as a deliverance.

Blanchett owns much of the film in terms of screen time and presence, but the lesser-seen personalities contain their own insights, affections and critiques of the subject. Ben Whishaw appears as the poet side of Dylan, on trial by an unseen prosecutor that could be jilted radicals as easily as the Establishment. Richard Gere, playing Billy the Kid in a reference to Dylan's involvement with Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, shows Dylan in exile after his crash. The real Kid died at 21, but Gere recalls the 36-year-old Kris Kristofferson of Peckinpah's film, not a boy who lived fast and died young but a weathered and withered vision of a dying symbol. The child Woody made out like he had the weight of the world on his shoulder. Blanchett's Jude didn't have to pretend, and Gere's Billy still smarts decades later from all that pressure.

I'm Not There contains its share of in-jokes and references. Haynes employs overt Hard Day's Night quotations when Jude meets the Beatles, and the funniest joke of the movie involves Jude introducing Brian Jones of the Stones as being "from that groovy covers band." Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) takes the film's metatextual elements to a new level as an actor who plays Jack Rollins and becomes a Dylanesque figure himself (he even marries the equivalent of Sarah Dylan, with whom he casually recreates the cover for Freewheelin'). These might be considered part of the typical pandering biopics do for fans, but then, the whole film requires a working understanding of Dylan's work and life from his early days through at least the '66 crash and a few scattered bits after that. The opening credits, played over shots of the outcasts of the world—complete with high-contrast, finely detailed images of coal-faced workers that recalls Gregg Toland's cinematography for The Grapes of Wrath—is clearly meant to evoke "Desolation Row." Unless, of course, you haven't heard that song, in which case the whole credits will be confusing. And the sly recasting of Bale's Jack Rollins, seen as a prophet to '60s radicals, as Dylan's Born Again avatar is a wry joke, for those who get it.

But perhaps this is how biopics of legends should operate, diving into the esoterica and letting those who have no familiarity with the artist—like my 18-year-old self—be left out in the cold. Why, after all, should the millions who love Dylan (or Cash, or Ray) and thirst for a real insight into the artist be forced to sit through a feature-length "greatest hits" for the sake of the clueless? Even if Haynes reinforces the notion of Dylan as fundamentally unknowable, his evocative, obscure shots and scenes say more about the artist than a host of documentaries and books. Case in point: Bruce Greenwood appears during the Jude section as a hostile journalist who hectors the artist for his immaturity. Greenwood is old enough to be the Establishment, his dismissal that of the older crowd who never understood why kids bothered with this guy anyway. Yet the actor returns for Billy's segment to play Pat Garrett, forced to confront the Kid one last time having failed to kill him in this universe. As Garrett stares into Billy's eyes, though, Haynes flashes back across characters as Mr. Jones harangues Jude, ignoring the young man's instability to attack its childish manifestations. Greenwood's Garrett feels the remorse of that memory; he did not kill the Kid here, but he did in a past life. This subtle connection says more about artistic martyrdom, misunderstanding and critical reevaluation than all the talking heads in the world.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2011)

Meek's Cutoff is an arduous trek through purgatory, the cracked and arid plane of reality separating the paradise a group of Oregon settlers seek to find and the hell to which they seem hopelessly destined. When the travelers change altitude on the bleached-bone plains of the Oregon High Desert, they always seem to go down, down, down deeper into this unforgiving pit of land. The expedition's guide, Stephen Meek (played by Bruce Greenwood, though you won't know it until you see his name in the credits), foretells the contents of hell, warning that it is full of bears, Indians and mountains. But those always seem to be just outside the frame, suggesting that they will fall into the bottomless maw of fire and pain at any second.

Of course, purgatory itself is a punishment meant to cleanse its prisoners of sin, and Kelly Reichardt opens her film with mood-establishing shots that set a tone of repetitive, grueling labor meant to deliver the three families (Will Patton/Michelle Williams, Paul Dano/Zoe Kazan, Neal Huff/Shirley Henderson) to their Eden. Long, static shots show the settlers moving across a river, descending down the sloping riverbed as if being swallowed at the start. Later, this vaguely disturbing scene will seem idyllic as the party moves further and further away from the fresh water they waded through to continue their journey west. Already, the seeds of dissolution, resentment and panic are setting in: before heading on with a few barrels of water to last them, one man carves "Lost" into a fallen tree nearby.

That simple message communicates the dwindling faith the party has in their leader, who brags all day about glorious deeds and his assurances of a better life awaiting them, only to get the wagon trail in more desolate lands. Meek is an imposing presence, a hulking grizzly of a man with matted hair, full beard and incomprehensible gruff, but set against the infinite desert of Oregon Country, even he seems small at times. When the travelers capture an Indian and debates killing him or using him to find water as supplies run dangerously low, Meek finds himself even further distanced from an increasingly hostile party who find themselves more willing to follow a potentially scheming prisoner who cannot communicate with them than the rugged mountain man who failed them.

Some have described Reichardt's film as a feminist Western, which is true in some respects but misleading. The women, one of whom has a young child and is pregnant with another, are brought along on this fool's errand by the men who insisted they'd be making a better life for them, and now they must press on just to survive. In her wide, horizontal panoramas of the desert (the camera always tilted slightly downward to further enhance the emptiness of the front plane), Reichardt almost always places the women behind the men. Long shots of the men debating courses of action are accompanied with muffled sound, a distraction until one realizes that these are POV shots of the women standing by waiting for their husbands to return with instruction. When Patton and Meek hold a vote over the Indian's fate, the women get no say.

Yet Reichardt never gives in to easy moralizing. When Meek states that women embody chaos while men embody destruction, his tone of voice communicates chauvinism, but the fact that he attributes negative qualities to both genders instead of glorifying men or beatifying women suggests a moral compromise that runs through everyone. The women never mesh with the environment around them, their bright dresses, even when caked in dust and dirt, always marking them as freakish within the director's dour mise-en-scène. Williams initially seems a figure of grace when she acts with kindness toward the Indian, but when Kazan asks why she's bothering to sew up the man's broken moccasin, Williams replies flatly, "I want him to owe me something." It's almost as if, despite the 1845 setting, she's seen the movies showing this sort of story and plans ahead to save her skin in case things go awry.

Her reasoning points to the moral complexity of the film as a whole, one that leads neither to lesson-learning consideration shown to natives nor grisly rapprochement for Manifest Destiny and white paternalism. A grim sense of fate hangs over the film, maintaining a level of suspense punctuated by the mounting horror that, regardless of what happens to this isolated band of characters, the implications of their senseless, cruel journey will be visited on the region as a whole before America finally claims all the continent it can.

That sense of loss and cosmic harshness pervades the party's journey. To lighten the load, families must dump nonessential items from wagons already containing that with which each family would not part. A makeshift iris shot out the back of the canvas wagon frames a family heirloom dropped unceremoniously into the dirt to be forgotten. Later, the child discovers an area filled with gold, but the settlers must keep going to find water and civilization first, so they leave an almost comically useless marker out in the middle of nowhere to return to it in better days. Only once after the initial shots at the river do the travelers come across water, but its undrinkable, teasing the desperate settlers like the ocean around the ancient mariner's ship.

The word "poetic" gets thrown around too often when most of the time people just mean "pretty," and Meek's Cutoff is not poetic. It is, however, terrible and beautiful, realistic but not realist in all its limiting rules. Reichardt's previous films displayed emotions so keenly felt that the plight of one struggling yuppie and her dog could be as moving as the most shameless tear-jerker, and a damn sight more honest. But here, she demonstrates a capacity for thoughtful, careful composition that makes the film as much a formal achievement as it is an allegorical one.

The film's utter lack of dénouement, perhaps even falling action, may vex some, but one should keep in mind its setting: Oregon Country in 1845 was itself in a purgatorial state between independence and incorporation into America and Canada along the 49th Parallel. The land in which this story takes place is unfinished and pulled in ambiguous directions, a realm illuminated and left dark by an ambivalent Virgil who does not speak the same language as his dependents. If Dead Man is the ultimate display of the West as hell, Meek's Cutoff may be the quintessential view of the West as a place of perpetual displacement and transition, though its dubious movement tends to lead in the direction of hell instead of heaven.