Caught an early screening of the new Todd Haynes film tonight. I’m thinking I should have taken a few notes. Haynes is deconstructing the bio-pic from every angle while urgently demystifying the mythologies swirling around a mercurial artist like Bob Dylan . . . and it mostly works, up to a point, though the thing is messy and insidery (hell, I have no idea who Sara Lownds is). It didn’t help sitting in an audience full of Dylan purists (it is Minnesota after all) who hung on every slippery yet iconic image Haynes was willing to offer up. Still, I’m not going to call it a mess nor do I think it is overtly intellectual. As you’ve probably heard, Haynes cast six actors to take on his vision of “Bob Dylan;” there’s the eleven-year-old black kid singin’ the blues and riding the trains, the twenty-year-old poet (Dylan as Rimbaud), the intensely politicized folk singer turned Christian evangelical, the plugged-in rock-n-roll asshole, the celebrity movie star misogynist, and the runaway cowboy hiding out from the law. Variations on Alan Ginsberg, Jean Baez, Lownds, the Beatles, and Edie Sedgwick also move in and out of the scenes. Haynes lovingly quotes Fellini, D.A. Pennebaker, Godard, seventies style talking-head documentaries, Sam Peckinpah, Conrad Hall, and others. Ultimately, the film appears to be an insightful meditation on race, power, identity, celebrity, America, war, sex, conformity, freedom, etc., but mostly the film sounds a discordantly pessimistic note as it interrogates the notion that any artist can and/or should be held responsible for advocating social justice and inciting social change. Haynes’ Dylan is a supremely narcissistic chameleon unwilling and perhaps unable to speak for any generation. If you want to keep a low profile, never create anything one of the Dylans remarks to the camera. Embedded within the act of creation are the seeds of destruction . . . and it’s the destruction, man . . . it’s the destruction that’s blowing in the wind. The times, they don’t seem to be changing one damn bit.