The Guardian

London:

A Bob Dylan biopic with five men and a woman all playing His Bobness was first announced in 2003. It was the idea of director Todd Haynes, then enjoying Oscar nominations for ‘Far From Heaven’. Haynes said he wanted to capture the many aspects of Dylan’s character, and his solution was a “multiple refracted biopic” in which Dylan would be played, among others, by an 11-year-old black boy and a young white woman. ‘I’m Not There: Suppositions’ on a Film Concerning Dylan, now going ahead via Paramount, seems to have refracted further, and it’s the woman who’ll be the black Bob Dylan, with everyone from Beyoncé to Venus Williams mooted. The press seems bemused by this. Why? What could be more resourcefully right, more aptly Dylanesque, than having the quicksilver king of re-invention played by a mixed bunch of mere mortals?

And of course they shouldn’t all be white males. The Bobs of down the decades have stood upon the rock of black music, on the beat-poet hipness of black street-talk, on blues lyric poetry. They have also embraced the cool of androgyny. That stare mid-1960s Dylan fixes you with: it’s a challenge to every assumption about boundaries. He’s been a carnival of people, images, voices and masks. Early choirboy-cherub Bob, mixing sweet youthfulness with immortal gravitas, looking 15 and sounding 85. Woody-walks-again Bob, Kentucky coal-miner chiselled Bob, motorcycle black madonna two-wheel gypsy king Bob and then out-on-the-edge-of-chaos Bob, bird’s nest hair in the electric druggy maelstrom. Soon after, Nashville Skyline Bob, the volte face of a smooth voice and a shy smile. And that was just the 1960s...

This is the artist who combines post-modernism with the pre-war blues, whose own best film role (in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) was a character called Alias (‘“Alias what?’ ‘Alias anything you please’.) and whose most recent movie is the clunkier ‘Masked & Anonymous’. “It’s Hallowe’en,” he told an audience 40 years ago: “I got my Bob Dylan mask on.” Two decades later he reminded another film-maker: “It’s like Rimbaud said, ‘I is an other’”.

If Todd Haynes can be trusted — he did make ‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story’ — bring on that team of Dylans, black, white, man and woman. But if, as announced, an actress plays mid-1960s Bob, then as Dylanologist Andrew Muir once said, they’ll never find anyone beautiful enough.