(x-post from Movie whores)

I am still trying to wrap my head around this film. It is at once a brilliant and equally frustrating experience. Having some fore knowledge, such as watching Martin Scorcese's documentary or even reading a Wikipedia entry on Bob Dylan will help you piece together the fragments of this movie. The style is truly unique and the acting, particularly Cate Blanchett (Oscar, please), is outstanding throughout, as is the music of course.

But what does it reveal about the troubador is hard to say because we don't know of the intercut stories told here, which are true, which are imagined, which are fantasy and which are factual. Dylan was an enigmatic man and a chameleon who chnged is being more than once in his career, often alienating his followers in the process. The film documents this well, but is edited in such a seemingly arbitrary fashion that does not coalesce into anything meaningful in the end. And that's a shame. Cutting from one Dylan to the other does not often have significance (occasionally it does) and the split between different stories (and actors) is done not entirely by timeline but by psychology, which makes the film quite a head trip. I didn't walk away knowing much more and had many more questions than I had before.

It's definitely a must see (probably 4 or 5 times as needed) if nothing else than for the performances and the music and to see if you can figure out any more about the strange men that made up Bob Dylan.

(PS... the machine gun scene is priceless)