The "Superstar" narrator posited Carpenter's voice as having "led a raucous nation smoothly into the '70s." Bob Dylan did no such thing. No matter which Dylan you speak of, the voice was not smooth, and it didn't lead a nation. But it was and is crucial to our understanding of American song and an American sort of paradox embodied by Dylan: The rebel, co-opted, media-flattened and put in a box, only to wriggle free and become something else.

The way Haynes spins his kaleidoscopic new picture "I'm Not There," clearly he's once again working out an obsession. He's also working outside the straight biographical film form, which is a relief (though for many it'll be a vexing alternative to linear storytelling). This Dylan film is more like a filmic essay, and I suppose you'd call it postmodern. A couple of young guys coming out of a recent screening of "I'm Not There" said they thought it was postmodern but with a strong nostalgia-hippie vibe. Those seemingly contrary descriptions get you pretty close to what Haynes has in store.

Dylanesque figures

Six short films intertwine, pulling bits of Dylan's resume and biography into its web. Haynes begins "I'm Not There" in 1959 with a young African-American kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails and then entertaining his latest friends with fabulous tales of his travels. He's a boy who is making up his life as he goes, looking like a Depression-era throwback and calling himself Woody Guthrie.

In short order Haynes rolls in other Dylanesque figures. Ben Whishaw plays "Arthur," who is poet Arthur Rimbaud, but Dylan-y. Christian Bale plays Jack, who later discovers Jesus and morphs into a preacher-savior. These men sound and act like Dylan to varying degrees, but no one ever utters the words "Bob Dylan" in "I'm Not There." We're dealing in impressions and riffs and fragmentary images.

Sometime in the middle of the 1960s, a rising young movie star named Robby gets the role of a lifetime: the lead in a fictionalized biography of a Dylan-styled folk icon.

Overlapping story lines

Spanning three different decades, "I'm Not There" is a triumph of historical re-creation and refraction. Haynes and his marvelous cinematographer, Edward Lachman, shoot each of the six overlapping story lines in a different way, drawing visual cues from Fellini's "81/2," D.A. Pennebaker's Dylan doc "Don't Look Back" and Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," among others.

This brings us to the best and the worst of "I'm Not There." Richard Gere is saddled with the slackest of the story threads, as an aging Billy the Kid trying to live out his life in seclusion outside a heavily allegorical frontier town. But Cate Blanchett! All hail Cate Blanchett! She is a knockout as "Jude," the Bob Dylan who is most like the Dylan of "Don't Look Back"-era legend. Blanchett gets the voice right, and more important, she unlocks the sardonic imp inside all the iconic fuss. She's very funny in scenes such as Jude and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) looking up at a statue of Jesus on the cross. Jude calls out a request for the Son of God to "do some of your early stuff."

Besides being a sure thing for a supporting-actress Oscar nomination, Blanchett is the guarded heart and soul of an extremely well-crafted puzzle.

The games Haynes plays with identity and memory are more common to literature and the stage than the screen. At Dylan's request "I'm Not There" was initially conceived as a theatrical project. On screen it is probably a Dylan or two above the ideal limit for one exploration of a superstar.

Yet I appreciate Haynes' craft and ambition. I love the Ledger/Gainsbourg scenes, which are sweet and sad and delicately shaded. And Blanchett's inspired not-quite-impersonation of Dylan is reason enough to tussle with the rest of it.