I finally got around to seeing I’m Not There last night. Wow. Wow. It’s very stream of consciousness and very heavily steeped in Dylan mythos. Very artsy, hovers near but never goes over the edge of being impressed with itself, and unabashedly goofy. It’s the perfect way to tell Bob Dylan’s story . . . with stories rather than a plot, with personas rather than characters, with truth rather than fact.

I particularly liked the reproduction of film techniques from the 1960′s — there is nary a steadycam shot to be found, and the quick zooms and Hitchcock-like use of reflection, glass, and black and white are really something. Cate Blanchett steals — just steals — the show. I should have, just for the fun of it, counted how many cigarettes the different incarnations of Dylan smoke.

Watching this flick left me with a profound sense of my own creative inferiority and a resurgence of my painful regret that I could not have been born in 1939. For all the pain and turmoil and drugs and angst, to have witnessed the 1960′s as a young person, to have heard those sounds and fought those battles . . .

Bob Dylan is the greatest poet it has ever been my privilege to hear. I would rip up every page of Keats and flush every last page of Shakespeare down the toilet in exchange for the power to make Bob Dylan immortal. This movie is so effing good. But unless you are a total and utter Bob Dylan worshipper like myself, you’re not likely to understand it at all. You’ll probably think it’s a pretentious piece of crap, or that it’s just nonsense that is only good to watch if you’re very, very high. I can’t convince you of that with any explanation. Like all good art, you just have to get something out of it for yourself.