'I'm Not There' digs deep

Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery directly after seeing "I'm Not There."

A head-spinning take on the many personas presented by the work of Bob Dylan, the latest film from director Todd Haynes is a dense, dizzying, multifaceted way of approaching the life and meaning of an artist, and pretty great whether you're a dedicated Dylanologist or not.

While his glam-rock gloss "Velvet Goldmine" was undone by a heavy-handed conceptual nod to "Citizen Kane," here Haynes is able to (almost) always keep all the plates spinning. At first, as scenes shift from one actor to another portraying Dylan in his various guises, it seems perhaps a little too on-the-nose. (A little too "Across the Universe" might be more like it, but that's another story.)

Slowly -- especially as it crosses between the domestic dramas of Heath Ledger (think "Blood on the Tracks"), the speed-freak op-art hep-cat jive of Cate Blanchett (shades of "Blonde on Blonde" and the film "Don't Look Back") and Richard Gere's outlaw in exile (a la "The Basement Tapes" and Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," for which Dylan did the music and appeared as a character notably named Alias) -- the film accumulates a strange, galloping momentum, moving faster and faster and drawing the audience along.

And that's leaving out the rambling troubadour and the born-again preacher.

As much as people will talk of Blanchett, Ledger, Gere and Christian Bale, it should be noted that there are three other fine performances in the film.

Julianne Moore plays a Joan Baez protest type and Michelle Williams an Edie Sedgwick ingenue, and Charlotte Gainsbourg appears as a version of Dylan's ex-wife Sara Lowndes, known to many as the "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."

There's also a fun, quick cameo form Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, again showing the way in which Haynes wisely opens up "I'm Not there" to more than just empty "you had to be there, man" nostalgia-tripping. (The conception and portrayal of the 1960s in the Beatles-derived "Across the Universe," on the other hand, is single-minded and deadly dull, like reading Rolling Stone in the '80s.)

Gainsbourg's performance in particular does a great deal toward rooting "I'm Not There" in something with more emotional resonance than just recognizing the references. Williams has a danger and energy really hinted at only by the Sedgwick bio-pic "Factory Girl," whereas Moore has the slightly rueful recollections of Baez down cold.

If anything, it's a shame that Haynes couldn't somehow have kept moving forward, as for me the most recent Dylan persona -- that of a dustbowl riverboat gambler -- is a personal favorite.

The theme of reinvention has been a constant one in Dylan's work, and Haynes was shrewd to pick up on it as a thread to hang his story together with. In Martin Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home," Dylan himself talks of wanting to exist in a constant state of "becoming," and in his book "Chronicles: Volume 1" he mentions how while writing the protest music that would originally make his legend in the 1960s he was largely reading and thinking about the Civil War.

Or, as he says on the "Live 1964" CD, "I've got my Bob Dylan mask on. I'm masquerading." -- Mark Olsen