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Six Dylans Are Better Than OneHow to make a pop-music biopic that doesn't stink.

By Jessica Winter
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007, at 3:09 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

For a film to re-enact events, of course, one needs some solid information to go by; a lack of hard data can be as weirdly liberating to a music biopic as a lack of song clearances. Gus Van Sant's Last Days (2005) portrays the occluded final week before Kurt Cobain's suicide without the benefit of a single Nirvana song or any certainty about Cobain's exact activities during that fateful time. Appropriately, Last Days is shrouded in ambiguity: Standing between the viewer and the Cobain character, "Blake," is a disorienting haze of heavy opiates and musique concrète. What's clear is that everything Blake does, from his rambles in the woods to his anesthetizing use of heroin, suggests a man on the run from his life. As an exercise in what-if, Last Days has affinities with Christopher Münch's The Hours and Times (1991), a wistful, romantic speculation on the holiday to Spain that John Lennon and Brian Epstein took together during the first stirrings of Beatlemania. No one really knows what happened on that trip, and this lacuna is the springboard for a bittersweet film vignette: the biopic as fan fiction.

I'm Not There likewise embraces wild conjecture and pure fantasy—it's not a film biography so much as it's a panorama of a persona. Here the former Robert Zimmerman is a shape-shifting imp, who at any given moment might become an African-American schoolboy, a po-faced Christian evangelist, or enfant terrible poet Arthur Rimbaud. Each character in the composite gets a cinematic style to match, with nods to Fellini, Godard, and Altman. The result is a film that isn't simply about Dylan but one that's possessed by his restless energy and shares his preternatural gift for self-invention and savvy borrowing, his ability to shed his skin at a moment's notice.

By contrast, Control has a single, gorgeously sustained aesthetic, framing the young musicians of Joy Division in mostly stationary master shots: tableaux vivants cast under charcoal and sepia shadows. The effect is both to evoke the dreary context that made the band possible—the grim-up-North twilight of Old Labor—and the overcast skies of Curtis' internal weather. As a young photographer, director Corbijn was responsible for some of the imagery that made Joy Division into icons, and though Control bears a deep influence of British kitchen-sink realism, the cinematography lends the band—the lost Curtis in particular—an otherworldly aura of spare, timeless grandeur. As played by Sam Riley, Curtis is by turns loveable, sympathetic, and maddening: a mercurial enigma. Even to those closest to him, he's always just out of reach.

Control wisely leaves the circumstances of Curtis' death open-ended: The viewer can interpret his suicide as the inevitable follow-up to at least one previous attempt, or the result of a sudden, catastrophic impulse—an urge that could have just as easily come and gone. On these and other questions, Control won't settle on one definitive answer any more than I'm Not There will settle on one definitive Dylan. The most compelling and challenging pop-music biopics implicitly converge on this point: There's no formula for demystifying our pop idols, and even if there were—why break a spell when you can cast another?

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Jessica Winter is a writer in New York.
Still from I'm Not There © 2007 The Weinstein Co. All rights reserved.
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