"I'm Not There."

I know nothing about Bob Dylan except that in my sophomore year of college, for a period of perhaps four and a half months, I could listen to every song on his Greatest Hits album (10 songs, from "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" to "Just Like a Woman") and feel strangely at peace with the world. I was also listening to alot of Simon & Garfunkel at the time. (The 60s, for me, were fall 2004 to the beginning of Spring 2005.)

So I might not be the perfect viewer of "I'm Not There," an infinite riff on the lives, loves, songs, and myths of Dylan. Much has been made about the surreal decision to have six different actors play Bob Dylan. It's worthwhile to note that nowhere in "I'm Not There" is there a character named Bob Dylan, nor does anyone ever mention the name. A Bob Dylan movie with six Bob Dylans who aren't Bob Dylan, with a title taken from a song that was never officially released to the public - not there, indeed.

Roger Ebert does a typically erudite job of mapping out how each mini-Dylan's story taps into a real-life fable from the singer's pop culture biography. All I know is that the movie is genius. Which isn't to say it's easy. The first twenty minutes are the most jarring, following Young Black Child Dylan across some vaguely southern landscape to Woody Guthrie's deathbed. Flash forward to Angry Young Poet Dylan, who exists in some strange Kafkaesque courtroom universe and will spend the movie staring straight at the camera mumbling brilliance in our general direction. Now see Christian Bale Dylan, as the movie shifts into a rockumentary , a kind of "Behind the Music." Now see Christian Bale Dylan played by Heath Ledger Dylan in a movie-within-the-movie. Follow? Heath Ledger's wife is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who grounds the movie with bitter romance and wisdom, often just when everything seems about to spin out of control.

This all comes at you even faster than I'm describing it, and makes no element of sense. What director Todd Haynes has done with "I'm Not There" is too essentially take the structure of the hyperlink movie - made indie-fabulous by "Traffic" and defaced forever by "Crash" - and push it to the next level. Hyperlink movies - "Syriana," "Love, Actually," and the profoundly unhappy films of Inarritu are other examples - tend to stress how all human beings are interconnected; Haynes wants to show us how all human beings are the same person. You All Everybody, you know?

I can't say when I started liking the movie. I just know that by the time Cate Blanchett shows up as Famous Dylan - touring around London, getting stoned with the Beatles, wooing Edie Sedgwick in a Felliniesque landscape of druggy Eden excess - I had no idea how long the movie had been nor how much longer it had to go, and felt like I could have kept watching it forever. And by the time Richard Gere wakes up in a Peckinpah Western as Billy the Kid Dylan, I didn't care that I had absolutely no fucking idea what in the holy world of hell was going on.

There's a moment in the Gere story - it feels like the end of the movie, although there's still more to go - when a singer (who looks like Christian Bale, although he's in heavy make-up so it could be Dylan himself for all I know) takes the stage to sing a dirge for a poor little girl who got her throat cut, and belts out "Goin to Acapulco," and everyone in the strange little Bizarro-western town stops to listen. It's the most exultant musical moment I can remember seeing in a movie. (Richard Gere has a great face for listening - here, and in "Days of Heaven," and during Julia Roberts' long speeches in "Pretty Woman" and "Runaway Bride.") The scene works, even if you don't know how, or why.

I had a tiny aesthetic argument with my parents over the weekend. They had seen "No Country For Old Men" off my recommendation - I warned them it was violent, but said it was my favorite movie from all year. They were asking me questions about the plot - why did the guy with the weird hair want to kill everyone, who were the Mexicans, who was Woody Harrelson, and what did the ending mean? I realized that I had no idea, and in fact, felt angry that they even bothered to bring all of that up. Who cares what it all means? "No Country" is, above all else, a movie about talk, about personality - Josh Brolin is our rugged everyguy who wants to get rich without working, Tommy Lee Jones is a sorrowful angel with a badge, and Javier Bardem is the devil. What do you need, a scorecard?

"I'm Not There" is the same kind of movie. If you try to understand it, you'll never understand it. Listen to the music. Go with the flow. If Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett are Bob Dylan, then, what the hell, so are you.