As with all things Dylan, perhaps going in with expectations was a mistake. Whether it's his songs, his books, or his interviews, what Dylan delivers almost never seems to be quite what you expect. That said, more often than not, it is of such a quality that you cannot quickly dismiss it as a disappointment. You're left with a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty that compels you to re-sample the work, often multiple times, before you can get a clear grasp on your own feelings about it.

Thus is the case with I'm Not There, even though Dylan had little to do with this film aside from giving director Todd Haynes the rights to his music. I was expecting an abstract, artsy film, perhaps at times bordering on absurdity, that reveals something about Dylan to those unfamiliar with him. I certainly saw the art and the absurdity, but aside from rehashing a few already well-known general facts that have been covered in previous documentaries (his conversion to rock music, the collapse of his first marriage, etc.), the film didn't seem to even make an attempt to reveal Dylan to the uninitiated.

Given Dylan's chameleon-like transformations throughout his life, the film's much-publicized approach of using six actors, including a woman (Cate Blanchett) and a black child (Marcus Carl Franklin), to portray his various incarnations seems to make sense. However, this film isn't just "Walk the Line" with six actors playing one character; it's a completely different approach to making a biopic. The movie zigs and zags among the six personas in a mostly nonlinear fashion, with each stage providing a mixture of fact and fiction in covering Dylan's youth, his rise to folk-singing stardom, his controversial switch to rock music, the course of his first marriage, and his born-again Christian phase in the 1980s.

Blanchett steals the show with her portrayal of Jude Quinn, who represents the rock 'n' roll superstar Dylan from the mid-1960s. Of the six characters, hers most resembles the actual Dylan, an ironic twist that was actually planned from the start, according to Haynes. Blanchett's imitation of mid-60s Dylan's mannerisms is uncanny. There were a few scenes where her face still appears a bit too feminine, but most of the time she looks and acts just like the real thing. Franklin was also a joy to watch as a cocksure youngster named Woody Guthrie who is wise beyond his years. Christian Bale does a fair imitation of Dylan as a protest singer, though his renditions of Dylan's folk songs are more melodious than the originals and at times lack the grinding quality that was a key part of those songs' emotional impact. Rounding out the sextet, Ben Whishaw portrays Arthur Rimbaud, a representation of the rambling philosopher face that Dylan showed to the media in the 60s; Heath Ledger plays Robbie Clark, who seems to embody Dylan on the homefront; and Richard Gere plays an over-the-hill Billy the Kid, whose life in hiding reflects Dylan's stint of seclusion in the late 60s.

Woven into the storyline are a collection of bizarre and fantastical imageries, many of which are references from his songs. In a way, the entire movie is akin to one of his compositions from "Highway 61 Revisited" or "Blonde on Blonde" -- a meandering stream of surreal scenes and characters, beautifully presented, strangely juxtaposed, and strung together by some elusive theme that you seem to sense but can never truly articulate. Haynes masterfully complements these imageries with appropriate selections from Dylan's music to set the mood. Parts of the movie feel as if you are literally walking along Desolation Row or seeing through the eyes of Mr. Jones.

A significant portion of the film is firmly grounded in actual facts, which comes as perhaps a bit of a surprise given Dylan's propensity for covering his true self in a smoke of haze. In one scene, Blanchett's character is blitzed with inane questions from the media that are word-for-word recitations of questions the real Dylan faced in documentary footage from that time. The musical performances in the film are also almost exact reproductions of actual performances he gave in real life. Other parts of the film, meanwhile, don't concern themselves quite as much with historical accuracy. For instance, Franklin's character is a railcar-riding child troubadour who claims to have played with famous bluesmen during his wanderings. Dylan fans would recognize this character as mostly a representation of the myth that Dylan built up around his past early in his career rather than a portrayal of his real youth.

The audience's ability to make sense of this mingling of fact and fiction pinpoints the film's biggest hiccup. In the traditional sense of what a biopic is supposed to do, this film seems to leave both the uninitiated and the hardcore Dylan fans wanting more. If you knew Dylan only as the guy who wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" before you walked in to this movie, you would walk out knowing almost as few concrete facts about him. If you lack the knowledge to separate fact from fiction and to understand the symbolism and references scattered throughout the film, you might feel like you just wasted 135 minutes staring at absurd, albeit beautiful and provocative, images. If you are a Dylan aficionado, you likely will appreciate the fact that the movie is laced with countless traces of his life and career, but you might also feel a bit let down in that you don't seem to have learned anything new about him because the film, when stripped of its unconventional approach and absurdist imageries, appears to be a mere rehashing of things that any veteran Dylan fan would already know.

Of course, it is clear from the get-go that I'm Not There isn't your traditional biopic, and the film, like Dylan's songs, is better evaluated as a sum of its parts rather than dissected and examined piecemeal. While the lack of conventional revelation can make the movie feel frustratingly uninformative for a biopic, it also perfectly embodies its subject in a sense. Dylan, after all, is a master at delivering songs that seem to say so much and then claiming that he's not really trying to say anything meaningful at all. And just as Dylan's songs tend to make you feel something abstract rather than tell you something concrete, the film might be trying to make its audience feel the essence of Dylan rather than just telling them the facts about him. Does I'm Not There fail to tell you about its subject, or does it merely not tell you what you were expecting to learn in the way you expected to learn it? I need to watch it again before I can give a more definitive answer.