So who really IS Bob Dylan, anyway?

Honestly, I don’t give a shit.

Within my own life experience, Dylan was the music, not the man. (Or, as the makers of the film “I’m Not There” are entailing, a woman in at least one shade of persona.) My memories of Dylan, thanks to an incredibly hip-for-his-age brother eight years my senior and a shared bedroom while we were growing up, are purely spawned from songs with words that may well have built an early critical thinking process in a five year old’s brain. I didn’t pick up on the life or image of Dylan (the type of stuff touched upon in work like the excellent documentary “Don’t Look Back”) until much later, and even then it was all about the songs and the images and statements created with them. Mr. Zimmerman was a teacher who made me want to pick up a guitar and say, “I want to do something like that.”

I recall seeing Ray Davies on TV a while back, and he said something about not wanting to ever meet his heroes because he knows he’d probably be disappointed. Maybe that is close to the excuse zone that is keeping me away from this movie, but perhaps the bigger reason is that I don’t mind learning the truth about the life experiences of notable people in history, but digging into abstract analytical concepts of what really makes the person tick is just a wee bit too much on the obsessive side for my personal taste. Therefore, this movie looks like a skip for me. I’ll just do something along the lines of listening to “Blood On The Tracks” for the umpteenth time if I want a peek at what’s going on in Bob’s head. After all, that’s something coming directly from the source.