I'm Not There (3) Woody

The boxcar scenes are as close as one can get to Hal Ashby’s “Bound for Glory” without Haskell Wexler controlling the light. The compositions are there, but the look is wrong. So, for that matter, are the characters.

The Woody in this case is not the Okie upon whom Ashby based his film, but an 11 year old black kid who is living in the world of a guitar slinging Unionizer. He has a line of bull streaming out of his mouth that is every bit as preposterous as the lineage claimed by the young Dylan upon arriving in NYC as a harmonica-blowing pipsqueak. But it is 1959, when Dylan would have been 18, not 11…and so the first disputable item is brazenly laid on the table….Haynes challenging the Dylanologists to put up a fight.

Like Luis Bunuel’s “The Milky Way,” which could only be fully appreciated by the clergy, although they would be the ones most likely to take issue with it, “I’m Not There” will antagonize anybody who thinks they have the goods on Bob Dylan. This might be why the scenes with Cate Blanchett are going down so easy with the film’s sympathetic audiences. The Dylan she plays is one who is already well known. Not so Marcus Carl Franklin’s creation, who I think is the most fully realized character in the film. We see in him the total absurdity of young Robert Zimmerman’s invented past that could only lead to the madhouse or the rock and roll hall of fame.

Franklin is the only one of the characters who does his own singing, and his version of “When the Ship Comes In,” a song Joan Baez claims was written in vengeful response to a hotel clerk who refused the two of them a room, is brilliant. Anyone who remembers the young Dylan performing such songs as the “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”: on the Steve Allen show will be amazed at how well Haynes uses Franklin to create a picture of a young person singing lyrics that are beyond his years.

This is what blew people away about Dylan in 1963. Take a look at him singing “North Country Blues” at the age of 22 from the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. Older musicians gawk in awe as he sings about things most people don’t even think about before the age of 50. Another great performance id Woody singing a front-porch version of “Tombstone Blues” with two older guys, one of whom is Richie Havens, who has been singing Dylan songs since the 60’s, that breaks the racial barriers of the blues. While watching this, I remembered that one of the takes of this song for the “Highway 61” album featured the Chambers Brothers on back up vocals. I bet Dylan felt like little Woody at the session with them

Like Dylan, this young Woody is a person outside of time. It is 1959 and he is singing union songs as if the union has yet to come into being. Also like Dylan, he is a lying little snotrag with ambitions of becoming the next Elvis Presley. And like all of us, he is the spirit of Walt Whitman wrapped up in a dusty piece of sagebrush blown across the plains of a haunted country.