I really enjoyed this very much. It made me want to see the movie yet again, really refreshed my love for it.

Thank you for going to the trouble to compose and share.

There was a talk on I’m Not There at the conference I was at last week, but I missed the talk. I always say I would love to hear this film discussed as great American fictional biography, and not as a movie about Bob Dylan.

You don’t need to know a thing about Bob Dylan to be engrossed by the way Haynes creates a collage using the themes of creativity, fame, authenticity, betrayal, public/private identities –American ideologies of individualism and populism make these themes exhausting battlegrounds for artists, and Dylan is the ne plus ultra here, and his life is only the palette for the movie, not its topic. The songs are used so effectively that you simply have to pay close attention to hear how they color a scene. You don’t have to know anything about Cold Irons Bound to feel that chill when strung out Cate Blanchett is in the bathroom drawing that mustache on herself (is there enough gender bending here for 14 doctoral dissertations??) and you hear that line “I’m beginning to hear voices.” Just pay attention. You can hear the wonderful incongruity of the surreal lyrics of Tombstone Blues in the little scene with Marcus Franklin and Richie Havens, just a bunch of black bluesmen singing, “Ma Rainey and Beethoven unwrapped a bedroll.” Just pay attention and you’ll get it.

It really is, to me, a movie that is similar to Dylan’s work only in that it repays close attention for anyone who is paying close attention. It fell off the screen so fast not because people weren’t getting the film’s Dylan code, but because it doesn’t offer itself up simply.