Who's in It: Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin
The Basics: It's about Bob Dylan. But there's no one in the movie named Bob Dylan. In fact, six actors — Blanchett, Gere, Ledger, Bale, Whishaw, Franklin — play people who embody a variety of ideas about the many phases of the public life of the guy we know as Bob Dylan, one of whom turns out to be Rimbaud, one who's an actor that gets famous playing a Dylan-like character, and one who's a young African-American child named Woody Guthrie. Already confused?
What's the Deal? Like his earliest movie, the only-available-on-bootleg-DVD, Superstar, about the heartbreaking life of Karen Carpenter, and his later feature, the dreamy mash note to glam rock artifice and star-struck fandom, Velvet Goldmine, what you get with a Todd Haynes music-based film (as opposed to his other genre, the one I like to call Julianne Moore in Peril … see Far From Heaven) is a new way of seeing the thing that you think you already know about. He scrambles it, pushes pleasure buttons you didn't know you had, makes you want to go back and listen to those songs again because he just opened up a new slant on the lyrics. His movies are the good drugs and he just wants to blow your mind.
Speaking of Mind-Blowing: Blanchett will leave you speechless. Some people will dismiss it as a good physical impersonation of Dylan, but that's just the costume. Haynes was right to cast her as the man in his "electric" phase because it's like everything around her becomes weird and crackly and almost frightening.
Dig These Cameos: Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, David Cross as Allan Ginsberg, Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams as not-Joan Baez and not-Edie Sedgwick but incredible simulations, respectively.
Does It Matter If You Know Anything About Bob Dylan Before You See It? No, because it's not a Ray or Walk the Line kind of biopic where one iconic moment happens and then another iconic moment happens, leading up to some ultimate musical triumph. It's all the moments happening at once. And if anything, not knowing about the guy will be like someone giving you a very cool puzzle you have to put together.