Visions of Bob Dylan

Like David Lean's famously fictionalized 1962 big-screen biography, "Lawrence of Arabia," "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes's new film based on "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan," according to the credits, begins with a fatal motorcycle accident. In real life, T.E. Lawrence was indeed killed in his bike wreck. Mr. Dylan, however, survived his. "I'm Not There" uses the actual 1966 crash, a career milestone of some significance to Mr. Dylan's more analytical fans, and his fictional death ("God rest his soul and rudeness," intones one voice-over epitaph) as a launching pad for a narratively inscrutable, historically unreliable, and yet emotionally lucid appraisal of Mr. Dylan's songs, life, and mythos, as well as the American decades that spawned them.

Mr. Haynes came to critical prominence via an equally unusual musical biopic, 1987's "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," a 45-minute film in which the director used Barbie and Ken dolls to re-create Carpenter's toxic family dynamic and tragic self-destruction from anorexia nervosa. For "I'm Not There," Mr. Haynes and co-writer Oren Moverman deploy six different actors playing six (or seven, if you count Christian Bale's "John" and "Preacher Jack" as separate people) impressionistic characters to romance the idea of Bob Dylan. The first is Ben Whishaw as Arthur, an early 20th-century poet impatiently enduring cross-examination by an unidentified tribunal.

RELATED: A Sun Podcast on a Premiere Party for the Movie

Arthur's apparent distaste for being branded a cultural rebel gives way to a young black actor named Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody, a genially arrogant young troubadour so enamored of Woody Guthrie's rebellious hobo image that he rides a boxcar through segregated America as if it were the dust bowl '30s.

Just a few steps ahead of the truth that he has, it turns out, taken to the rails to elude, Woody transforms into Jack (Mr. Bale), a taciturn young performer taking the early '60s Village folk scene by storm. Jack begets Robbie (Heath Ledger), a narcissistic rising movie star of the mid-'60s who meets, marries, and ultimately disappoints Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Robbie, in turn, gives way to Jude (Cate Blanchett), a strung-out human riff culled from Mr. Dylan's mid-'60s reinvention as a bona fide rock star, an evolution that confused the singer's fans and the international press, and climaxed in his motorcycle crash. Finally, after Jude's somewhat disastrous tour of Britain subsides, Richard Gere takes over as Billy, an exiled Western outlaw living alone with his dog.

"That was exhausting," a colleague exclaimed (though grinning broadly) after a screening of "I'm Not There" prior to the New York Film Festival. Taken as a kind of gestalt showbiz biography, the film is indeed difficult to absorb in a single viewing. Though Ms. Blanchett's performance has become the pre-release calling card for "I'm Not There," the Jude sections are the most problematic. Several factors threaten to lower the film to the level of the average nostalgic swinging '60s biopic (think the dreadful "Factory Girl," or the laughably two-dimensional "Backbeat"). They include a stand-in for doomed Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick; a bizarrely squeaky clean walk-on by an actor playing the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones; a portrayal of Peter Yarrow's completely mythical attempt to pull the plug on Mr. Dylan's Newport Folk Festival electric debut, and a musical sequence that gives a literal interpretation of the lyrics to Mr. Dylan's seminal "Ballad of a Thin Man" as an anti-critical screed.

But Mr. Haynes, in a career that has produced five features and several shorts, has demonstrated an ability unmatched among contemporary American filmmakers to absorb more than a century's worth of film grammar and the visual vocabulary of narrative point-of-view in order to reflect it back at his audience refracted, distorted, or meticulously re-created, depending on the nature of the material. The truly audacious thing about "Superstar" was not that Mr. Haynes chose to use Barbie dolls for actors, but that he shot and staged the film like a full-size live-action movie.

Incorporating black-and-white and color footage of wide-ranging and intricately designed hues, faux documentary beats, and a Western coda with a sensibility halfway between Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman, "I'm Not There" is never less than visually robust and ceaselessly imaginative. The remarkable, resonant, and, on second viewing, beautiful thing about the film is how sympathetically the director not only braids six different visual styles, but how he and Mr. Moverman achieve a supple emotional symmetry that transcends any conceptual roadblocks that audience members with their own Dylan obsessions (guilty) might bring to the table.

Working for the first time in widescreen, Mr. Haynes (in collaboration with the cinematographer Ed Lachman) masterfully capitalizes on the hidden strength of CinemaScope photography. Yes, the spectacle frame loves landscape, but as filmmakers from Richard Fleischer to Kon Ichikawa to Sergio Leone have demonstrated, in widescreen filmmaking, the eyes have it.

The Dylan stand-ins and rich supporting performances (including David Cross as Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Greenwood as both a philistine British arts critic and Billy's bearded nemesis, and Michelle Williams as the Edie Sedgwick clone Coco Rivington) solidly ground "I'm Not There" and its director's singular obsession with Mr. Dylan's work in a tenderness, intelligence, and honesty that radiates from the eyes out.