With a predominate Dylan soundtrack that effectively employs the performer’s lesser known songs, and alternating black and white and color cinematography, Haynes uses non-linear intersecting storylines to fuse these seven “historical fiction” characters — all of whom go by names other than Dylan — who illustrate the many lives of American popular music’s most legendary rolling stone.
Director Haynes’ film is startlingly original in its effortless amalgamations of Dylan’s personae, and most pleasantly inspired in its casting and performances. The eleven-year-old Dylan “personality” — introduced in 1959 and named Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) — sings about Depression-era boxcars and economic hardships. This represents the childhood background that Dylan admittedly fabricated when he arrived in New York City in 1961.
Without a doubt, the casting coup for any film made in 2007 — or perhaps any movie of the past decade — is Blanchett as the “electric Dylan,” Jude Quinn (when the musician dramatically went from acoustic folksinger to plugged-in electric guitar-playing howler). In a deserved Oscar-nominated best supporting actress turn, Blanchett embodies the mid-1960s Dylan — dark sunglasses and bushy hair, at odds with his "betrayed" folk audience (“Judas!”), and always looking to scratch a generation’s uneasy itch. Little did we know five decades later that Dylan would become the standard bearer for American Idol reinvention. Blanchett is the only Dylan persona that intentionally looks and sounds like the performer. And, like Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles, she imbues Dylan’s poetic spirit. He is she, and she he — a restless popular culture icon saying something familiar to an unsettled generation with something passionate to say.
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