Dig it — over the years, Bob Dylan has had more identities than Madonna. He’s remade himself time and again, first as a folkie, then a nihilistic rocker, then a cowboy-singer, then a Christian, and then back to his Jewish roots. So what we’ll do — this is cool — what we’ll do is make a movie about the man, with all of his personas intact and then — wait for it — we’ll cast it with different actors! And if that’s not innovative enough, one of them will be an eleven-year-old African American and one will be a woman. (Well, Cate Blanchett, anyway.)

That’s the impression I got when I first heard about Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. What an underwhelmingly original idea. And casting Blanchett (as Jude Quinn) and Marcus Carl Franklin (as the eleven year old kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie) seemed like the worst sort of stunt casting. And to tell the truth, it sometimes plays like that as well. Sometimes it feels as if a game of spot the star, or — better — spot the star playing a star. There’s Julianne Moore as Joan Baez (oops, I mean Alice Fabian) and Michelle Williams as an Edie Sedgewick clone. Blanchett’s Quinn is a virtual doppelgänger for Dylan, and her performance is not interpretation but outright imitation. Get it? The character most like Dylan is a woman! Sometimes, it all seems just a little too . . . precious.

And yet, I found myself drawn in by its inventiveness, by the way the different Dylans’ stories dovetail and interlock, reinforcing and playing off one another. Christian Bale’s Jack Rollins (the pure folkie Bob) exudes inarticulate angst, tortured by his refusal to be pigeonholed as The Protest Singer. When Dylan rebels against it, in his famously reviled switch to rock n’ roll, we get two views of it: Blanchett’s Quinn and actor Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) who makes it big playing Rollins in a biopic. In Quinn and Clark, we have two contradictory sides of the singer: the acid-tongued rocker who refuses to be what others want and the man corrupted by his fame.

Rounding out the Bobs, Ben Whishaw plays a poet who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud, and Richard Gere is Billy the Kid; having survived his encounter with Pat Garrett, he’s just Billy now. Rimbaud provides ironic commentary in the form of an interview with faceless authorities; he is photographed in black and white, in front of a white backdrop that gives his words a stark verisimilitude.

Gere’s character is perhaps the most complex, as well as the most enigmatic: he embodies the urge to retreat from view, to hole up and lick his wounds that Dylan showed most clearly after his motorcycle accident. Dylan played an outlaw in Peckinpah’s Pat Garret and Billy the Kid; here he seems to represent his impulse to enigmatic, egotistic showmanship. He’s holed up in a town called Riddle, the inhabitants of which have names related to songs in The Basement Tapes. Riddle’s circus-like atmosphere recalls Renaldo and Clare, Dylan’s ambitious four-hour attempt at personal mythmaking and hubris.

Part of what saves I’m Not There from a descent into terminal pretentiousness is Haynes’ playfully cockeyed touch. Poet Alan Ginsberg (David Cross) appears out of the blue, alongside the car in which Quinn is traveling, to declare that he’s “sold out to God.” Meanwhile, the singer and his entourage bubble on like star-struck schoolgirls. In another scene, Quinn tumbles into the frame with four mop-tops, in an amphetamine-fueled homage to Richard Lester’s Help.

I’m Not There is surreal and dreamlike; a word that came immediately to my mind is “Felliniesque” (in one scene Haynes directly quotes the famous opening scene of 8½). The entire film has a 60’s art-house feel, right down to the most beautiful, black-and-white cinemascope photography this side of Truffaut. If you go into the film expecting linear, well-delineated narrative, you’ll be disappointed. If you can go with the flow, and be content with the notion that you aren’t necessarily going to figure it all out — and that’s a good thing — then I’m Not There just might fill the bill.

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