What makes a good musical biopic? For every Sid and Nancy, why must we suffer through conventional narratives like Ray and Walk the Line? When we have masterful glimpses of rock mythology like The Hours and Times (a look at a young John Lennon hanging out with Beatle manager Brian Epstein), why must there also exist over-the-top musings such as Oliver Stone’s The Doors?
The answer, my friend, is probably blowin’ in the wind, or possibly the Ethernet, and that’s probably how to best judge recent biopics like Anton Corbijn’s Control (a look at ill-fated Joy Division singer Ian Curtis) and Todd Haynes’ schizophrenic depiction of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There.
Maybe that’s the problem with the biopic genre: we are face-to-face with digitized glimpses of our musical heroes every time we search YouTube. So who needs simulations? You want archival footage of Bob Dylan, Ian Curtis, John Lennon or Jim Morrison, it’s there at the push of a button. This amazing bit of technology means that the dead (and the merely ancient, such as Dylan) never really die for us. They will always be preserved in bits of uploaded lore, for us to turn over and investigate like curious seastones. Rock lives on in the music, of course, but it has another reality, a secret history imbedded in all the bits of TV footage, the fudged talk show interviews, the backstage antics and outtakes. This is all part of history, too, as much as it is part of myth.
Which makes the biopic a little bit irrelevant. The gambit of the genre is that it seeks a compelling story arc in an often-truncated life. Therein lies the attraction, for the storyteller. Control is based largely on the memoir of Deborah Curtis, the suicidal singer’s estranged wife, who found his body swinging at the end of a rope one morning and also co-produced the film. Thus it tends to reduce the troubles of Ian Curtis to a romantic fling. There were other factors as well, of course: Curtis’s epilepsy, his reluctance to embrace fame and troubles too ineffable for the biopic to depict.
True, Anton Corbijn’s images are deeply reminiscent of the era, a picture of Manchester we remember largely from magazine articles and, yes, archival TV footage. Curtis was poised to tour America with the band in a few days. Instead, he hung himself. Though Sam Riley does a credible job of capturing Curtis’ peculiar facial tics and dancing style, there’s not quite enough material to offer any deep insights into this enigmatic personality. Corbijn instead goes for “kitchen sink realism,” literally focusing on the kitchen sink and humble dwellings of the Curtis household. The concert footage is powerful and evocative, and some of the humor implicit in managing one of rock’s most ambivalent stars is captured. But if you want to see the way Ian Curtis really does it, watch the half dozen videos (Transmission and She’s Lost Control in particular) on YouTube to get an unmediated slice of rock reality. (And while you’re at it, skip the cruddy live video of The Killers stinking up Shadowplay — they’re one of several bands asked to contribute songs to the Control movie soundtrack. It just goes to show that the fruit has fallen far outside the orchard and turns to rotten mush in the hands of Joy Division disciples.)
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Bob Dylan has thrived on enigma for five decades. Beginning as a Woody Guthrie worshipper, then a Greenwich Village folkie, shifting gears into rock, then country, then born-again Christian rock, and now shimmering as a timeless chronicler of Americana, he’s not an easy subject for biopic. Todd Haynes chooses to honor all the shape-shifting by casting five actors to play him, delving into an imaginary hobo period (where Dylan is played by a motormouthed, guitar-strumming black kid) to a brooding folkie period (a broody Christian Bale), through a less-than-domestic marriage (to Charlotte Gainsbourg, who really should play Patti Smith in a biopic) and looping back to the mid-‘60s permed Dylan, expertly assimilated by Kate Blanchett. There are peculiar emissions from Richard Gere as an aged Dylan-esque dude wandering around in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (in which Dylan had a small, twitching role) and an Ellis Island-type interrogation scene where he’s played by Ben Whishaw.
Dylan freaks will groove on the in-jokes, the careful reproduction of mise en scène, especially in upstate New York and merry old England, where Dylan was previously captured in a fascinating D.A. Pennebaker 1967 documentary called Don’t Look Back. In fact, that documentary will tell you much more about Dylan’s mercurial nature — part talent, part asshole, part soothsayer, part sophist — than any of these five performances will.
And music freaks will dig the soundtrack, which allows everyone from Cat Power to Sonic Youth to Eddie Vedder to Stephen Malkmus to lay their imprint over Dylan originals. It’s a two-CD soundtrack that rewards the faithful with rarities (a previously-unreleased “Basement Tapes” outtake of I’m Not There) and spirited remakes.
But non-believers are not likely to be converted by the film, which (as Norman Mailer once said of a certain writer) may just bury more truth than it uncovers.
Still, one has to enjoy the goofy abandon of Haynes’ approach. He has Dylan mingle with the Beatles, turning them onto pot for the first time; they flit around the landscape like Teletubbies. He throws in Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and has the two questioning Jews heckling a statue of a crucified Jesus — a moment that, Haynes suggests, leads to the singer’s soul-searching and religious conversion. It’s all fantasy, or most of it, but when you abandon the restrictions of the linear biopic, you must take the good with the bad, the truth laced with pure fiction.
Blanchett, as usual, out-impersonates all the other Aussie and Brit actors in her midst. She has a rare gift for chameleon-like performances, so she’s best suited to play a character who takes on so many guises. Her twitchy mannerisms, gesticulating hands and needle-like comments at once summon and lampoon Pennebaker’s mid-‘60s Dylan.
In the end, as one character suggests, I’m Not There is not so much a composite as “a compost.” It’s all thrown into the mulch pile — Dylan’s “betrayal” of folk purists in 1964, his Bible-thumping phase, his failed marriage which led to the masterpiece album, “Blood on the Tracks.”
But does even the most-fervent Dylan-phile learn anything new from this biopic? Perhaps only that the true enigma remains bound up in its own shimmering existence. Anything beyond that is speculation, whether it’s what killed Ian Curtis or what makes Bob Dylan tick. Not even YouTube can explain those mysteries.