Margot at the
Wedding
NICOLE KIDMAN, JENNIFER JASON LEIGH
PARAMOUNT VAN TAGE, R
Bohemian raspberries from
The Squid and the Whale auteur
Director Noah Baumbach follows
The Squid and the Whale with
another literary take on family
trauma in middle bohemia, one
that’s both tender and cutting.
Kidman’s title character, whose
every sigh is a hot breath of
passive-aggression, slides back
home to celebrate (that is,
break up) her spacey sister’s
marriage to a terminal loser. And
with Margot herself revealed
as a paragon of domestic
befuddlement, the siblings’
small moments of treachery and
score-settling snowball into a
nasty avalanche of misplaced
love. Jack Black, often too
tenaciously manic for anybody’s
good, makes himself hilariously
welcome as the groom-to-be,
a clown who, having cultivated
an ironic moustache, won’t shut
up about exactly how ironic his
moustache is.

Kidman as Margot

points of rock iconography well, but this tribute gets its juice from the close attention he pays to the man himself. Temple’s cut together a heap of home movies, concert clips, old interviews, and celebrity remembrances to slice past the legend of Joe Strummer and capture the high-strung human being beneath it.

Blanchett

Ledger

Franklin

What About Bob?

The actors, they are a-changin’ in Dylan-inspired puzzler

I’m Not There ½ CATE BLANCHETT, HEATH LEDGER THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY, R

To turn Bob Dylan’s life into a movie that Dylan himself—and maybe only Dylan—would fully endorse, director Todd Haynes rummaged through the master’s hobo sack of storytelling devices and pulled out tricks borrowed from cubist collage, symbolist poetry, and down-home riddles. Haynes has walked the line between musical biography and pop deconstruction before: He cast Barbie dolls in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and his glam-rock epic Velvet Goldmine concocted a biography for Ziggy Stardust that featured Oscar Wilde. While I’m Not There lacks the power of Goldmine, its surreal way of splitting the singer into six separate personae still makes for a heartfelt head trip.

sparkling poignancy. Then there’s Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century writer, bristling with Dylanesque wisecracks in some 20th-century interrogation room; a black kid calling himself Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin) who hops boxcars, bangs out “Tombstone Blues,” and tries to hide a past in Minnesota; and also Billy the Kid, who feels that long black cloud coming down in a befuddled bit that mixes Peckinpah with Fellini.

Its surreal way of splitting the
singer into six separate personae
makes for a heartfelt head trip.

In the straightest of the story lines, Christian Bale hunches over a harmonica as Dylan stand-in Jack Rollins, a folk hero belting out protest songs in the early ’60s. A cocksure actor named Robbie Clark (Ledger) portrays Rollins in a deliberately corny film-within-the-film. (“They took away the meaning,” Robbie-as-Jack whines at the Joan Baez figure. “I was a pawn in their game.”) From there, Haynes launches into Robbie’s tortured romantic life, dramatizing love songs (“I Want You”) and hate songs (“Idiot Wind”) with

The most mesmerizing of the film’s half-dozen outlaws is Blanchett’s Jude Quinn—a plugged-in, hopped-up superstar adapted from the sneering Bob of Don’t Look Back. Haynes begins and ends the action with Quinn reliving Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle crash, and maybe the best way to make sense of I’m Not There is to imagine it as the vision that passed through the singer’s head as he wrapped his Triumph around a tree. Ripping through the artist’s back pages, the film rearranges them as a jagged tone poem.

Joe Strummer:
The Future Is
Unwritten
JOE STRUMMER, MICK JONES
IFC FIRST TAKE, NOT RATED
Eye-opening, ear-pleasing doc-
umentary on the late Clash man
Tracking the late musician from
his brattish youth as a diplomat’s
son to his blistering years
fronting the Clash and through
his charmingly weird tenure as
a prophet wandering the rock
wilderness, this high-velocity
documentary offers sufficient
depth to exhilarate the faithful
and more than enough style to
enchant casual viewers. As the
director of two feature-length
fantasias on the Sex Pistols and
the Imax film that supersized
the Rolling Stones, filmmaker
Julien Temple knows the fine

Before the Devil
Knows You’re
Dead
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN,
E THAN HAWKE
THINKFILM, R
Sibling crooks target their folks
in Sidney Lumet’s icky thriller
Given its premise—two brothers
try to knock off their own par-
ents’ jewelry store—it’s natural
that this heist flick’s every nuance
evokes moral rot: the flat strip-
mall light of the crime scene, the
blunt-angled faces of random
heavies, the ponderous synths
on the soundtrack. Hawke looks
horribly rodentine as younger
brother Hank. A purplish Hoff-
man plays Andy, an accountant
who’s been embezzling from his
firm to fund his heroin habit. In
post- Tarantino style, director
Sidney Lumet starts with the per-
fect score going perfectly wrong
and then shuttles between the
messy setup and wrenching
fallout. The substance, however,
is pure 1940s pulp, and until the
unfocused ending, the movie
delivers old-school melodrama
by the Dumpster load.

_T SP_hOT_eLI G_FHT_u O_tN_u TH_rE_e M U_IS_sIC _UOF_{n written} Structured as a beyond-the-grave broadcast of the show Joe Strummer DJ’d for the BBC World Service in his last years, The Future Is Unwritten pays homage both to the music he made and the music that made him. Among other tricks, the soundtrack casts fresh glances at a few forefathers (check Elvis Presley on the louche and humid “Crawfish”) and gives a number of cult hitmakers their due (witness the golden groove of Jamaica’s Dr. Alimantado on “Best Dressed Chicken in Town”). To quote Strummer’s on-air patter: “If your radio’s tuned here, your radio’s tuned right.”

Strummer

Strange brew: Hawke and Hoffman have evil on their mind in Devil.

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