I’m happy to report that the forthcoming DVD version of Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” is packed with extras that are truly special.
The two-disc release will be on sale May 6 and it includes a wonderful tribute to the late Heath Ledger, who died only a few months after the Bob Dylan bio-pic opened late last year.
Ledger is one of six actors who play Dylan in this wonderful re-imagining of the way movies treat the lives of pop artists.
Because Dylan has gone through so many changes in his life and career, it seems entirely right for Haynes to use different actors for each phase of the artist’s life.
Cate Blanchett dominated most of the coverage of “I’m Not There” with her Oscar-nominated gender-bending performance as the Dylan of the mid-1960s — the “Don’t Look Back” period — but the other five actors are equally strong.
Ledger’s performance takes on a whole new tone in the aftermath of the actor’s Jan. 22 death because he plays out some of the most difficult moments in Dylan’s life — when the artist’s marriage was collapsing and the singer-songwriter sank into a depression.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the troubled wife, and she and Ledger have an intense sexual and romantic chemistry.
In the special tribute to Ledger on the second disc, Haynes includes extended shots of the two glamorous actors driving along a country road in a sports car.
Ledger is wearing vintage sunglasses and gives off the same sort of Hollywood movie star charisma James Dean has in those photos showing the legendary actor in and around the sports car in which he died in 1955.
“I’m Not There” is drenched in movie style as well as the sounds of Dylan — Haynes references Fellini and Godard throughout the 1960s scenes — so the director’s pairing of Ledger with the sports car now carries haunting echoes of another star who died too soon.
