One "test" I rely on to determine the artistic effectiveness of a film is to wait a few days after viewing to see whether its imagery remains in my mind—so the various flashbacks swirling a week after experiencing Todd Haynes' I'm Not There confirm its greatness. Haynes takes us laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the screen with Dylan metaphors and anecdotes that plop us right into the middle of his work. The creative and surreal biopic is the cinematic equivalent of reading Dylan's playful Tarantula—a film not aimed at anyone but Dylan fans. A minimum pre-requisite for appreciating Haynes' opus would be viewing D.A. Pennebaker's wondrous Don't Look Back since it is referenced frequently. Though a completely stoned person could sit through the film and think they got something out of it.

Whether you view the film as hallucinatory or visionary will largely depend on how deeply you've dived into Dylan's poetry. Blessed recently with unearthed Dylan gems from Scorsese (No Direction Home) and Murray Lerner (raw Newport footage in The Other Side of the Mirror), we now have a definitive biographical film designed in Dylaneque style. As Richard Gere's prophetic character states: “It's like having yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room.”

The “mystery tramp” is played by six actors, who transport us through his various personas—blues replicator, Woodie Guthrie jukebox, folk singer, electric rebel, rock star, family man, poet, outlaw, born again Christian, prophet. Although the film time shifts and juxtaposes imagery throughout, a rough progression through Dylan's life emerges.

Eleven year old African American Woodie Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) rides the rails with fellow hobos, spinning tales from the Depression and sharing blues and folk songs from the era and "killing Fascists" with his guitar. He's jarred from complacency when a kindly black mother advises him to "live in his own time," and soon resurfaces as earnest and shy folk singer Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), who carves out his niche in Greenwich Village with topical songs and strikes up a relationship with famous protest singer Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore) but refuses to confine himself to message songs or to her.

Meanwhile actor Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) falls in love with artist Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and duplicate the cover of his Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album in the Village and settle in to raise a couple of daughters before the relationship begins to crumble, definitively referenced with "Idiot Wind" from Dylan's painful Blood on the Tracks album.

Getting the lion's share of time, cleverness, and references is Cate Blanchett as electric rocker Jude Quinn, who arrives at Newport to alienate folk fans before heading to England on tour. Pennebaker's documentary is freely borrowed from with great humor and playfulness, as Quinn shares drugs with the Beatles, associates with Allen Ginsberg, and spars with the press. Blanchett deservedly will receive raves for her acting, as her finely timed sharp wit and Chaplinesque gestures mimic the enegmatic Dylan, but what completely mesmerizes are her pensive reactions—check out the sighting of Allen Ginsberg or the silent response when a journalist (Bruce Greenwood) penetrates Dylan's veneer.

Interestingly, Haynes reverts back to Christian Bale to illustrate Dylan's brief flirtation with Christian evangelicals. He also uses an Arthur Rimbaud persona (Ben Whislaw) as interview subject to serve as an analyst and provide a perspective: "I accept chaos. I don't know whether it accepts me."

Old man semi-hermited Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) lives with his dog in chaotic Riddle, Missouri with a thinly masked plethora of Dylan metaphors (jugglers,clowns, animals just off Noah's ark, etc.) before boarding a train for another destination. It's really not necessary to understand fully exactly where he's heading or where I'm Not There has taken you, but that's the beauty of Dylan's creativity and with Haynes' film. How do any of us fully understand what's going on in this world, or in ourselves. Dylan's been provoking thought for decades, and now we have a film that matches his spirit. It's just not for everyone. It's possible that Haynes' film will find only a cult audience—geeks that will fill the blogosphere with frame by frame analyses and listing of Dylan references. But the film really deserves a wider audience, who can tolerate the chaos of visual metaphor and understand the nature of creative freedom that is so eloquently expressed.