Premise: I'm not going to write a plot description. It doesn't make sense to sit here and try to tease out this dense, tangled knot of a movie into a pithy paragraph. It won't help you understand what you see. Cate Blanchett, "Jude Quinn": We'll start here for two reasons: 1) She's getting the most press of the six actors to take on the role, and 2) she plays the most easily recognizable Bob Dylan. I don't mean that it is a caricature. I'm not saying that she doesn't resemble a young Dylan (you'll marvel at her ability to hold her face that way). Simply, she plays the most easily recognizable period in Dylan's life (Dylan goes electric; Dylan gets into a motorcycle accident). The level of technical mastery on the part of the actress that goes into transforming this stunning woman into an angry, fragile, drug addled young man is worth the admission price alone. The creative spark that allows Blanchett to go beyond that, to move out of the shadows into real darkness, is worth a mint. All of the Dylans display some level of repulsion with the media and its creation/destruction of celebrity; Blanchett plays it as its ugliest: baiting interviewer Bruce Greenwood, fighting with his loyal band mates, tossing out insults to Michelle William's Edie Sedgwick for sport. It's in Blanchett's scenes that you can genuinely feel why Dylan couldn't stay folk forever.
Christian Bale, "Jack Rollins": Bale portrays Dylan at the height of his folk scene and again in Christian revival mode. The two sections fit perfectly around Blanchett's, feeding and informing them in their initial stages and then showing us the results. Bale's section is one of two that take on a more artificial form. Instead of watching it unfold naturally, it is a documentary TV piece exploring Rollins' rise and fall and presenting us with his first interview in decades. It's framed by black and white photographs, grainy footage, and Julianne Moore's Joan Benz providing interview material. If Blanchett's Dylan was angry, then Bale's is furious. He's also furiously disconnected, which suits the material and the role, but ends up disconnecting the audience as well. It's a great role and portrayal, but it doesn't dig as deep as it could. I'd sooner put that on director and co-writer Todd Haynes than Bale, though. 
Heath Ledger, "Robbie Clark": Clark is the actor who portrays Rollins in a biopic, a moment that ends up being the high point in the young actor's career. He's also the only one we capture in a relationship (with a woman he meets on set) and the only father (of young girls). It's more than a little strange to be writing about the day of Ledger's sudden death. It's sad. Should you see this movie (and you should), you can find all manner of similarities that make writing about Ledger in this role now heavier than it ought to be. Ledger's work here is a marvel of foreshadowing. Even the slightest movement or gesture lets you know how it will end. At no point are any of the Dylans any happier than Clark is in those early days with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and his broad smile and down-to-earth manner are thrown into sharp relief by the places his ego and personal disappointment will take him.
Marcus Carl Franklin, "Woody Guthrie": As a young troubadour riding the rails (and possibly on the run), Franklin's Dylan would seem out of place if the simple edict to write about his times instead of those of the past didn't feed directly into Rollins's arc. Haynes has a created a wonder in how each individual Dylan fits together even when you can't imagine how it will work out. Franklin is the only one who does his own singing. His Dylan brings sweetness and levity into the film, but there's also a scary dark side at which Franklin more than capably hints. He's all set to sell himself out to Hollywood until tragedy forces him to rethink what being a musician really means. Franklin's Dylan is filled with hope in his observant youth.
Richard Gere, "Billy the Kid": More than a few have said Gere's Dylan is the silliest, but I can't agree with that. For one, Billy is Guthrie pushed to his illogical extreme, and there is something exciting in the telling of it. For two, it's not hard to see the relationship between a Billy the Kid who dodged Pat Garrett's bullet and went into hiding and the artist who takes on new personae with ease and regularity. Each townsperson calls him by a different name when he rides into town, and it is in this vignette/story/whatever you want to call it that we get closest to what Dylan's own constant metamorphosis as artist has cost him as a man. As an actor, I've always found Gere difficult to pin down. The performance here is smooth and unfussy, providing the film with a perfect coda even if some of my fellow viewers jumped up at the end of the previous scene (one of Blanchett's) and applauded pre-emptively.
Ben Whishaw, "Arthur Rimbaud": I got all excited to call Whishaw a young whippersnapper here, only to discover that he is older than I am. Whishaw as the (mis?)fortune of playing the most reflexive of the sextet, but it doesn't do him a disservice. Arthur is tethered to a chair in a bare bones press conference, and he provides the context and sometimes even subtext for the other Dylans (more so than even Kris Kristofferson's narration). He channels the jangling nerves that characterize Quinn's interactions with the press as well as Rollins' disconnection into a series of strange Dylan-isms, both grounding and enlightening. If one man was going to do it, it had to be Haynes. From the blinking "i'm not here/her/there" title in the opening shots to Ginsberg (David Cross) and Quinn hanging out with Jesus to the fantasy sequence with Rimbaud tethered to the earth below, this movie is as unmistakeably Haynes as it is Dylan. Only the man who brought us Bowie by way of Citizen Kane and a biopic starring a Barbie Doll could present us with so something far from a conventional biopic that could still manage to be the definitive take on the life of an ever changing artist.
In the end, this movie isn't about Bob Dylan, Man. It's about our perceptions of Bob Dylan, Artist, as funnelled through his music and pushed back out again to its extremes. It's as if everything we ever thought about the voice of so many generations sprang to life from hazy dreams and fantasies to something fully formed, intelligent and strange. It's a beautiful picture and one that goes on long after you leave the theatre. A
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