(This movie has already been out for over a week, obviously. However, when I saw it last Friday I felt compelled to write about it—it's been a long time since I saw a movie that stayed with me for this long. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, by all means do so ASAP.)

It must be something in the water. Filmmakers have rediscovered the mythology of the American frontier, and that old powerful myth that a man can wander out into the wilderness and assume a different identity—become the person he always wanted to be. On Mad Men, the first season’s most poignant storyline detailed how ad man antihero Don Draper (Jon Hamm) created a new identity for himself and rewrote his past to fit. In The Assassination et al., the Coward Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) spends a long time crafting his own identity as a killer. Even Into the Wild, saddled though it is with an unlikable solipsist for a hero, gets considerable emotional power out of the appeal of changing your name and taking to the open road.

Todd Haynes has gone further into this American myth than anybody else. I’m Not There, with six different actors playing six different personas of Bob Dylan, not only depicts but embodies the freewheeling, rail-hopping American dream. The film leaps from one story to another, from a drugged-out Don’t Look Now-era Cate Blanchett to a firebrand Pentecostal Christian Bale. Haynes is as stylistically promiscuous as his hero(es), flirting with references from Federico Fellini to Richard Lester. No less than its characters, I’m Not There is constantly in a state of reinvention.

It would be easy to conclude, then, that Haynes—with his stunt-casting and his self-conscious namedropping—is just engaging in so much intellectual self-congratulation, or (to be nice) that this is a movie for the hardcore fans. Keith Phipps of the Onion A.V. Club concluded that “the more Dylan you take into I’m Not There, the more you’ll get out of it.” This is a mistake, however. The more Dylan you take into it, the easier it is to treat the movie as nothing more than a semiotic crossword puzzle to which you already know the answers. Some critics have even turned around to argue that the movie isn’t really true to the Dylan persona, blaming Haynes for being both too faithful and not faithful enough.

The standard critical response to I’m Not There is wrong on two counts: the movie’s seductive surface (even skeptics credit the work of cinematographer Ed Lachmann) is paired with a real depth of feeling; and the movie’s not really about Dylan at all. (He’s not there!) Todd Haynes has always been drawn to stories about escape, and characters whose lives are deformed by urges they cannot articulate, much less control. That sensibility anchors the movie: I’m Not There is about the exhilaration of the open road, and about the moment you realize that you’re still stuck with yourself.

Image via Internet Movie Poster Awards Gallery