Introducing the first pubic screening of Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" on Friday night here at the Telluride Film Festival, rock critic and Bob Dylan expert Greil Marcus prepared the audience saying, "Even if everyone in this room loves it, you will be arguing about this film for a long time." Indeed, not even 24 hours after the first showing ended, festival-goers have been buzzing about, and debating, Haynes' innovative, exhilarating look at the life of an American icon. As has been well-documented, Haynes explores Dylan's life through seven distinct characters performed by six different actors. And the film essentially offers a deep examination of music, cinema and popular culture rooted in the 1960s.

In "I'm Not There" -- with access to anything that Dylan said, sang or wrote -- Haynes has actually created multiple movies, each distinctly designed and shot, and then woven them into a two-hour and 15 minute film that is even greater than the sum of its parts. If you get up to go to the bathroom during this movie, Haynes quipped on Friday, you could miss 15 chapters of the story. Notably, other than an on screen statement at the start of the film that reads, "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," the musician's name is never spoken in the film. The different personas of Dylan each have different names.

Cate Blanchett portrays a version of Bob Dylan at his most familiar, in the mid-'60s during his infamous transition from folk to rock music, while Richard Gere plays Dylan as a 'Billy The Kid' type who lives in a Fellini-esque Western town, and Christian Bale is Dylan as a seemingly reborn Christian preacher man. It continues from there, with roles for Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, and Marcus Carl Franklin.

"Great actors want to do unconventional things," explained Haynes, in a conversation with Greil Marcus on Saturday morning, saying that despite a notoriously dense script for this film, "All I was really focused on was trying to find a narrative and cinematic parallel, on some level, to what Dylan did to popular music in his era, not that it's ended and not that it's a singular turn." Continuing he said, "I think I knew from the outset that I would fail ultimately because the '60s were such an extraordinary time of audience openness to new ideas -- expressing ideas and political ideas -- and the hunger for newness and a suspicion of things that make money. That's not true today."

Today, Haynes emphasized, artists and performers cannot be as elastic as Dylan was with popular songs and achieve both artistic and popular success. "It would be a miracle," Haynes said, "If the popularity that marked Dylan's life would be something that we could experience today."

"I am drawing from film tradition for each of the stories," Haynes noted this morning a few hours before leaving Telluride for his movie's Venice Film Festival debut. And those looking for links from his own filmography won't have to go far, finding clear connections to both "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" and "Velvet Goldmine," which each also explore popular culture.

Noting that the idea of freedom, a key concept in "I'm Not There," is the ability to escape a fixed self, Haynes also reflected on similar themes in his own work. He said that his films explore the "dilemma of identity" that for becomes a "straightjacket." Concluding the thought he said that characters in his movies, "demonstrate different kinds of rebellions against those constraints."

[Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE]