My Toronto sources won’t cough up, but the odds are favoring a Toronto Film Festival unveiling of Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, the apparently episodic/impressionistic/multi-stranded Bob Dylan film that has six actors (Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw) playing the legendary poet/singer. It’ll probably show up at the slightly-earlier-breaking Venice Film Festival also, but Weinstein Co. publicists are claiming they don’t know the score with that. (The Venice lineup will be announced on 7.26.)
The U.S. release date, however, is clear: November 21st and not September 21st (which is what the IMDB is wrongly reporting).
A guy identified as Ericwithak is claiming some degree of familiarity with I’m Not There, having written that ” the movie is running way too long, [in part because] the flow from between Dylan’s is strained, at best. I got the impression that its a really great idea that was not fully developed on the page. The idea of multiple Dylan’s could work really well, but in its incarnation, it feels like there’s no reason for it beyond the fact that it’s a cool idea. I found myself often wishing we would spend more time with Blanchett, who is the heart and soul of the movie and gets Dylan better than everybody else.
“Don’t get me wrong — no one in this is outright bad (except maybe Gere), but I just don’t know what the hell they were all doing there. There is a really good movie in there. I do believe that. It just needs a very gifted editor to get it out.”
Take this with a grain of salt, of course. I don’t know Ericwithak, although he’s declined to get in touch. That makes him suspect in terms of his character or at least in terms of his internet vigilance. That said, what he’s written does square with what I was told about the film by a somewhat knowledgable trade guy prior to Cannes.