When filmmaker Nanfu Wang happens upon the voluntarily-homeless Dylan Olsen in a Florida hostel, she finds him not only tolerable, but fascinating enough to spend an indeterminate amount of time following him across the country as the subject of a documentary. Now, if I happened upon Dylan Olsen at a Florida hostel (or anywhere, really), approximately sixty seconds of conversation with the bleach-blonde vagabond would be about all I could handle.
For the first chunk of “I am Another You,” as we are first meeting the twenty-two year-old Dylan, he lets loose with a constant flow of drifter-philosophy, including such gems as: “Being lost is where I’m found” and “this [idyllic hostel] is a very beautiful cage, don’t get me wrong, but it is a cage. The world is my home. I belong out there… It’s the easiest life I can imagine.” And so Dylan chooses to live on the streets, to hitchhike around the country living off of the kindness of strangers.
And strangers are sure kind to Dylan. People just seem to want to shower him in food, money, and shelter. An ex-Mormon, Dylan is young, charismatic, handsome, and smart, and thus his “homelessness” is really more akin to “backpacking.” Someone offers Dylan fifty bucks to fraudulently take a time-share tour; upon getting paid he immediately buys a large dinner (beer included) and gives the remainder of the money to a random stranger. During dinner, he befriends a family eating at the next table; their conversation ends with the matriarch giving Dylan twenty dollars and telling him to call her if he ever needs something (“you have another mom in New York [now]”). He spends the twenty on alcohol.
Soon, Nanfu begins to question the poignancy of Dylan’s chosen lifestyle. Is being homeless admirable, or even particularly interesting, when it is a choice? Is it really pure to abstain from a safer, steadier existence, when you spend what little money you do obtain on drugs and alcohol? Eventually, Dylan crosses a line in Nanfu’s eyes: the owner of a bagel shop kindly gives Dylan a bagful of fresh food, upon learning of his homelessness and hunger. Instead of keeping the food on-hand, and appreciating the shop owner’s gesture, Dylan attempts to sell the bagels (presumably for alcohol money, or maybe just because he simply doesn’t like bagels). When he is unable to offload the bagels, Dylan simply throws them out (by leaving the full plastic bag in a puddle on the road). Nanfu realizes, essentially, that Dylan is kind of an asshole, and parts ways with him.
I won’t go into the events of the remainder of the film here, so as not to spoil the viewing experience. Because this is a film that’s worth watching, even if its subject is a superficially shallow tool. As the film progresses, we begin to understand a bit about what makes Dylan tick, and he becomes a slightly more sympathetic figure. His story, and his family’s, is in fact universal. There’s a lot here about individualism and tolerance clashing with religion and tradition, and when the film does explore these themes explicitly, it’s nuanced and fairly interesting.
Far more interesting, however, is Nanfu Wang, who spends most of the film behind the camera. The most striking moment in “I Am Another You” has Nanfu conversing with a server at a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese-born American immigrant, Nanfu tells the server that she is studying documentary filmmaking, and that after graduating, she “plans to work [in the U.S.]” The server responds, “but China is pretty good now.” Nanfu says, “but it’s still not free.”
This brief exchange gives the viewer some idea as to what Nanfu sees in Dylan and his lifestyle. One begins to understand her fascination with the absurd things Dylan chooses to do with the freedom afforded him growing up as a fairly well-off American; her native culture is one where Dylan’s lifestyle would not likely be tolerated or even allowed.
While shooting “I Am Another You,” Nanfu spent two years in China making “Hooligan Sparrow,” a documentary about civil rights in China. I have not seen the film, but it has a stellar reputation (and I certainly plan on seeking it out now). Nanfu talks about how much safer she felt, living with strangers on the streets of America, than taking public transportation in China (for fear of the government detaining her for making a film critical of the Chinese state). It paints a portrait of a deeply thoughtful, insightful and curious filmmaker-journalist who I cannot imagine I fully understand without seeing “Hooligan Sparrow” as well.
On its face, “I Am Another You” is not the most captivating documentary ever made. Its subject, Dylan, is barely sympathetic, and only toward the very end of the film, once the filmmaker retcons in some stuff about mental-illness. His is not a story that especially needed to be told. But if you read between the lines, you’ll see the etchings of a self-portrait that is far more complex and engaging than the Dylan Olsen-shaped watercolor in the forefront. [B]