Just who does Bob Dylan think he is? There must be a truth, a real life story way down underneath the layers of the biography that Dylan has created, but where that truth lies is probably only known to Mr. Zimmerman himself. So how does one approach making a film about the life of a man who has made a career out of self-mythologizing and asking us to please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain? Todd Haynes has the answer: play by Bob's rules.

Bob Dylan's name is never mentioned in I'm Not There. He does make a brief onscreen appearance, at the end, in archival concert footage. But aside from that, and aside from Dylan's music, which the film is about just as much as Dylan himself is about his music, there is no direct connection between the film and the man. Haynes' film has no straight lines, it is all collage and pastiche and an endless series of intersections that all, quite improbably, lead to a startlingly accurate (if abstracted) vision of the many faces of Dylan.

Six actors take on the role. There's Marcus Carl Franklin, a 13-year-old African-American troubadour who goes by the handle of Woody Guthrie, travels as a vagabond on the rails, and has a fixation on Depression-era folk, forgetting that the Depression is long since done. Christian Bale is Jack Rollins, a painfully earnest civil-rights era folkie who disappears from view only to re-emerge in the 1980s as a born-again Christian and church pastor. Heath Ledger is Robbie Clark, the actor who shoots to fame when he plays the part of Bale's character in a movie about Jack Rollins. Cate Blanchett (who looks more like Dylan than anyone else in the film) is Jude Quinn, an androgynous folk icon who alienates his fans by turning rock star. It's the story that most closely mirrors real life. Richard Gere is, believe it or not, an aging Billy the Kid, who, in the film's world, actually escaped the clutches of Pat Garrett and lives on in anonymity in a surrealistic, Fellini-inspired rural town. Finally, there's Ben Whishaw, in the most obscure of the stories, who spends his entire segment cheekily answering questions while in the custody of an indeterminate authority figure and calling himself Arthur Rimbaud.

Confused yet?

Oddly enough you won't be, unless you hold stubbornly to the idea that a biopic should, you know, stick strictly to the facts. What sounds like a mess on paper (though Haynes says he sold Dylan on the idea with just a one-page description), is rigorously structured onscreen, intercutting quite deliberately from one unrelated story to the next and back again. Each story is shot in its own distinctive style: some color, some black and white, but each evocative of the '60s filmmakers Haynes studied in preparation to make the film. There are flourishes of Richard Lester, Fellini, Godard, Pennebaker and others thrown into the mix, and it's a testament to both Haynes' skill in re-crafting those styles, and to that era as a whole that makes the approach seems so fresh. The clear visual and narrative delineations between characters helps keep track as we skip back and forth from one largely unrelated story to another, whether the medium is the faux documentary of Bale's story, the lush and colorful romanticism of Ledger's, or the dreamlike fantasias that pop up all over.

Part of Haynes' success may also be attributed to his refusal to place Dylan on an untouchable pedestal. The Rimbaud character is plagued by a disaffected petulance. Guthrie is a runaway with a rocky past. Rollins' earnestness borders on cloying. Clark is an adulterer and a misogynistic attention whore. But all the characters still carry in them a spark of Dylan's genius, which doesn’t necessarily redeem them of their faults, but does present them (and, by extension, Dylan) as overwhelmingly human, whether in myth or in reality.

Haynes' supporting players perform admirably, particularly Charlotte Gainsbourg as the heartbroken wife of Ledger's philandering actor, the role a blend of a couple of primary Dylan love interests. Julianne Moore plays a Joan Baez stand-in with a tongue-in-cheek twinkle in her eye, and David Cross has a hilarious turn as Allen Ginsburg. But the most important supporting role of all goes to Dylan's music, which is present in nearly every scene in one form or another, either Dylan's originals on the soundtrack, or covers from an impressive array of performers including Stephen Malkmus, Mason Jennings, Calexico, Eddie Vedder and Sonic Youth, often standing in for when the actors are performing Dylan songs.

What happened in Dylan's life to bring him from point A to B to C is neither the intention of the film, nor what it accomplishes. For that, there's Scorcese's excellent No Direction Home. There's a moment in the film when a BBC reporter (an excellent Bruce Greenwood, who also does double duty in the parallel role of Pat Garrett), trying to unearth the "facts" about the enigmatic Jude Quinn, tracks down the singer's high school yearbook and uncovers his formative years. It's a "gotcha" moment, the misguided reporter thinking that in unearthing some shred of true fact, he's cracked the code to who Quinn is. But, as Dylan sang, "All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie." Haynes, on the other hand, takes a whole pack of lies and manages to find a whole lot of truth.

I'm Not There opens today at a number of area theaters.