Dylan, the sum of ‘There’ parts

Even as they track their subjects’ adventures in drug addiction, doomed relationships and self-destruction, Hollywood movies about musicians tend to be hagiographies: the artist as martyr to his talent. Like comic book superhero movies, they peg that talent to a defining moment of pain, then sit back and watch it metastasize. Music biopics burnish the image, buff the icon, vacuum around the base of the legend as they simultaneously revere and loathe that mysterious force.

Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” is a film about Bob Dylan, but it’s as far away from a movie like “Ray” or “Walk the Line” as it can be and still be considered an example of the same genre. A meticulous deconstruction of the legend, “I’m Not There” is the anti-biopic. It stars Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw as Bob Dylan. None of the characters they play are called Bob Dylan, however (nor Robert Zimmerman, Dylan’s real name, for that matter), and only some of them look or sound like him. (Blanchett takes top honors for both.)

Haynes has always been interested in the mechanics of self-invention, the distortions of fame, the burden of defining oneself, and his characters have always chafed against the limits of who they are. As the increasingly alienated housewife in Haynes’ “Safe,” who believes herself (and she may or may not be) to be allergic to her life, or as the 1950s white wife of a gay husband who has a transgressive affair with her black gardener in “Far From Heaven,” Julianne Moore played characters so thoroughly defined by their environments that any deviation from the norm rendered her unrecognizable to those who knew her. In “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes explored questions of seeking freedom from society through art. With “I’m Not There,” he completely dismantles the narrative in search of truths unencumbered by hype, fear, ignorance or worship.

There are plenty of things to admire about “I’m Not There.” Its artistic and intellectual ambitions, for starters. Like all of Haynes’ films, this movie burrows into your mind and stays there, bringing up questions, for some time after it’s over. On the other hand, it feels at times like a formal exercise that, although interesting, doesn’t quite cohere into anything larger. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to extrapolate symbolism from Dylan’s life and persona -- he isn’t a symbol of anything but himself, as Haynes seems to acknowledge.

Franklin plays a box car-jumping kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie and sings Depression-era folk songs. Franklin’s character represents the artist in his formative years, when influences still dominate personal style. Woody is 11 and black and bears no relation to Dylan that we can see -- just as the middle-class suburban kid from Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman had nothing in common with Guthrie. When a family takes in him one night, he is chided by the matriarch for not living in his own time. “Sing about your own time.”

Before he does, he becomes Jack Rollins (Bale), a young folk-singing sensation whom we see through the device of documentary that includes interviews with his ex-girlfriend Alice Fabian (Moore as a Joan Baez-esque folk singer).

What in traditional biopics would be the inevitable home life subplot in which we witness the meeting and marrying of the soon-to-be long-suffering first wife, Haynes keeps at a clever remove. Ledger plays Robbie, an actor playing the folk singer in a biopic, whose own home life, as his fame starts to grow, begins to resemble the singer’s. A luminous Charlotte Gainsbourg plays his wife, a French painter named Claire, the woman he loves but can’t stop betraying. The most conventional story in the film, it’s also the most engrossing, along with the thread about the post-acoustic Dylan, superstar, played by Blanchett.

Blending elements from D.A. Pennabaker’s Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back” and Federico Fellini’s artist’s cri de coeur, “8 1/2 ,” the Jude (Blanchett) section is electric in every way -- from the moment the singer alienates his fans at a folk festival by plugging in his guitar and Pete Seeger tries to cut the chord with an ax. Haynes has said he chose Blanchett to represent the weirdness, to Dylan’s die-hard fans, of his sudden shift from folk to rock, but perhaps not coincidentally she gives us the truest representation of Dylan as pure image, as indelible cultural icon. David Cross and Michelle Williams make memorable appearances in this section as Allen Ginsberg and Coco Rivington (respectively, of course). Like the director character in “8 1/2 ,” Jude is forever being interrogated -- by his fans, by his friends, by the press -- as to what he means by his work, his stances, his actions. Everything he does is scrutinized, divined for meaning, read like tea leaves, dredged for clues. (Much the way conventional biopics take on artists.)

What Dylan means is broken down by Haynes into his amazingly multifarious cultural roles: poet (Whishaw plays him as a character named Arthur, after his hero Rimbaud, who narrates the film while under investigation by a commission wanting to know about his motivations and subversive intentions), prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity, rock ‘n’ roll martyr, born-again Christian. Bale reappears in the end as Rollins, who having rejected his stardom has been ordained a minister in a Pentecostal church. The outlaw is played by Richard Gere as a Billy the Kid-type figure -- Dylan in the John Wesley Harding phase.

“I’m Not There” is a challenging film, one that I suspect can only benefit from multiple viewings. The success of its approaches varies, but its intent is unfailingly interesting.

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“I’m Not There” MPAA rating: R for language, some sexuality and nudity. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes. At selected theaters.