(2007, b/w and color) "Most of the time I don't know who I am," says Billy the Kid McCarty (Richard Gere) on a boxcar headed nowhere. "Poet, outlaw, prophet, fake," intones the narrator (Kris Kristofferson) in director Todd Hayne's filmography (approved by Bob Dylan) in which six actors portray six fictional personas ("I've walked and I've crawled over six crooked highways") of Aaron Jacob Edelstein (Robert Zimmerman).

Toting a guitar case, an eleven-year-old black boy, who says he's Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), hops into a boxcar with two hobos, and tells of how he began learning to play and sing the blues and writing his own songs four or five years back: "A song is something that walks by itself."

Born October 20th ("I am present at the birth of my thought"), Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) sits in the dock, accused of being a poet, smoking cigarettes and expostulating: "Me, I'm a trapeze artist."

A young woman says she prefers folk music because it's "honest," unlike (as producer Morris Bernstein puts it) "the big bad commercial tastelessness." Folksinger and activist Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore) tells the interviewer that back in the early '60s: "Nobody was writing songs like that … turning them out like tickertape." Here was someone with "true vision," someone else remarks. "He is speaking for me and everyone who wants a better world," Alice says of Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), who stopped protesting after 1963.

Threatened by three nobos, Woody leaps from a boxcar off a bridge into the water where he has a vision of a whale.

In 1964 actor Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), appearing in his first major film, meets French art student, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), in the Village in New York City: "Love was in the air," says Robbie, while "I Want You" fleshes out the soundtrack. "Visions of Johanna," nine years of marriage and conflict in Vietnam - in January 1973 President Nixon declares "peace in our time" - Robbie, acclaimed as the new James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one reefer, is linked romantically to his co-star Louise Pickering.

Playing guitar and singing in the home of Esther Peacock, who rescued him from drowning, Woody (no formal training) says he wants to become "the voice of the people … make it big" in Hollywood like Elvis Presley, before a juvenile center in Minnesota calls, inquiring about a fugitive. It's 1959 when the kid after seeing an article in a newspaper travels to New Jersey to sit beside the hospital bed of the dying, real Woody Guthrie.

Drunk on wine, Jack, invited to receive an award, addresses the Civil Liberties Union (getting used for their cause), embarrassment over suggesting an association with Lee Harvey Oswald and himself: there's always "something expected of you," he grouses and later apologizes.

Looking most like the original - "Everybody knows I'm not a folksinger" - Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), lonely in his fantastic imagination, his fans complaining of their Mighty Quinn - "He's changed completely!" and "He's evil!" - performs on an electric guitar with a rock 'n' roll band: "You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend …"

With material drawn from Don't Look Back (as well as the disjunctive, fragmentary style of abruptly cutting from a scene and shifting to another), a reporter asks Quinn: "Are you trying to change the world?" "Am I trying to change the word?" he mocks before proscribing against those who burn their draft cards or themselves because such behavior won't accomplish anything other than dissociation.

"I accept chaos," says Arthur, "I'm not sure whether it accepts me." After frolicking with the Beatles (acting as silly as the Monkees in squeaky voices), Quinn responds (in his "whinny and asthmatic" voice) to the BBC's Keenan Jones (Bruce Greenwood): "You just want me to say what you want me to say." Jones asks how Quinn feels about his songs being used to recruit people to violence, such as the Black Panthers: "Who cares what I think? I'm not the president. I'm just a storyteller."

Allen Ginsberg (Quinn's idol) comments through the back window while passing Jude seated inside a car: "Perhaps you sold out to God." A surreal, visual interpretation of "Ballad of a Thin Man" has Keenan Jones inside the song that asks: "There's something going on here/ And you don't know what it is,/ Do you, Mister Jones?"

It's 1968, "And there we were with Richard Nixon" - no politics, just sign language: Claire's upset with Robbie's chauvinistic statement that men and women are different: though God may be a woman, women can't be poets. Later they'll argue over custody of the children.

From the view "All Along the Watchtower" in Riddle County, Missouri, the outlaw (either dead or dodged a bullet) Billy in hiding enters the town of Hallowe'en, a giraffe in the background with a band playing mournfully for a dead girl: "There must be someway out of here/ Said the joker to the thief." If Robbie could communicate with Jack, who goes to Bible study in California with his girlfriend Angela Reeves, morphing into Father John, our savior, preaching a Pentecostal message, "Jesus paid for your sins to be free," he might cackle a confusion of contradictions that when they do meet next time (nature cannot touch dreams) it will be the end for one of them. (Jones reveals Batman's true identity.)

"You never know how the past will turn out," Quinn says to Coco Rivington (Michelle Williams), who's "gone like a smile."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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