It has been fascinating to read the polarized reviews of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, from A.O. Scott’s swooning but richly evocative celebration to Armond White’s frothing evisceration (of both the film and everything Haynes stands for). As someone in (about) the middle (here’s my review), I feel like a Man Without a Country. I even got a curt e-mail from producer Christine Vachon — with whom I wrote a book called Shooting to Kill — expressing her disappointment with me for not recognizing Haynes’s ambition. I’m so off her Christmas list.

One of the problems with “blogging” film festivals is that some movies need time and space to settle into one’s psyche, and my thoughts on Todd Hayne’s weirdo Dylan biopic (I use the term loosely), I’m Not There, after its New York festival press screening are preliminary: They’re based on my irritation in the first half and my gradual appreciation and excitement as the movie developed some momentum. Haynes grapples directly with the charge often raised against the singer-songwriter, beginning with his legendary abandonment of Woody Guthrie–ish acoustic folk and the near-riot in Newport, Rhode Island. It’s a charge that’s the subtext of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, voiced over and over by those who knew him when: that nothing in Dylan is organic, but rather based on a series of calculating poses. Haynes makes the case — obliquely — that this is the source of Dylan’s genius.