I'm Not There + Director Q&A, Curzon Mayfair

When a genius makes a film about a genius starring a genius, you expect it to be good. Todd Haynes, Bob Dylan and Cate Blanchett are all at the top of their respective professions, and all known for making wonderful, strange, surprising pieces of work, so it is no surprise at all that I'm Not Scared is strange and wonderful and very surprising indeed.

In the director Q&A, Haynes - friendly, relaxed, in an old shirt and jeans, drinking coffee from a polystyrene cup - said that his intention in making the film was to preserve the essential weirdness of Dylan. In this he succeeded beyond the call of duty. I'm Not There divides the Dylan role into six - seven if you include the dual role played by Christian Bale, as trobadour Dylan, then pulling the short straw as Christian Dylan in a jewfro wig - the most Dylanesque of which is played by Cate Blanchett, in the most uncanny, spooky way, more of a possession than a performance, as 'Jude Quinn' i.e. 1966-era electric "Judas" Dylan. It's an incredible feat, she somehow morphs into him, but it is not just an imitation, rather a channelling, a scrutiny, a magnification. You utterly forget that you are watching a woman, but nor is she a man, she is more like a creature, the tarantula you see crawling across the screen in one of the party scenes. Her central role is surrounded by all of the other parts of Dylan, so that instead of a straight biopic you get a sense of the many aspects of Dylan as a person, the private, the public, the young, the old, most of all the developing creative and political mind, and all of it swirling and intercutting between fictional stories that somehow tell you a composite truth. At times it is the most pretentious thing you can imagine. At times it is completely baffling. The Richard Gere story, in which his character is in some kind of modern-yet-ancient American folk theme park Halloween past, based on Fellini and Billy the Kid, with added ostrich and giraffe, epitomises both these tendencies, and yet what is Dylan but pretentious and baffling? Contrast these with the stark images of Ben Wilshaw as raw 20-year-old 'Arthur Rimbaud' Dylan, in bright light and unforgiving black and white, sitting twitchily, stating his mission plan. This is also true. As is the precocious black kid, the shy protest singer, the selfish star...

This works so much better than any conventional biopic. I'm not a Dylan devotee, and I didn't know much about Dylan when I went in, and in some ways I still don't know anything about him. I don't know where or when he was born, how he got into music, what his albums were called, whether or how many times he married, how many children, how many hits he had, whether he had any breakdowns, drugs, rehab, what he's doing now, whatever. My factual knowledge of Dylan, in other words, remains sketchy. And yet I feel like I know Dylan, where he came from, who he was, what he did and why and in what context. It's an extraordinary film, it shouldn't work but it does. An amazing celebration of the power of genius.