I want to say Todd Haynes’ ballyhooed Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is disappointing, but what, really, did we expect? A test for films like this is whether, in the end, there is something in the result that the subject would dislike or be offended by, and it’s hard to think of anything here that Dylan, a master controller of his image, or his longtime manager, Albert Grossman, would have blanched at. And there’s many things, too, he would definitely appreciate, much of the result tracking thematically with the images of himself he presented in the PBS film No Direction Home.

Here, Haynes responds to the songwriter’s manifold career with a cubist trope—having Dylan represented not just by different people at different stages of his career, but by entirely different heavily fictionalized characters in what in effect are separate movies, all wound together in a shattered but tangentially chronological order, stretching from his first days on the road to, roughly, the gospel period in the early 1980s. In one, for example, Heath Ledger plays a film star, come to prominence by playing a Dylan-like pop icon in a biopic, who meets, marries, raises a family with, and then splits from a French artist, in what is supposed to represent Dylan’s relationship with his first wife; in another, a campy Cate Blanchett plays the Dylan we know best, the combative press conference jouster and suddenly electric showman.

But in the end, almost all are disappointing. In the most ambitious segments, for example, Richard Gere plays a Billy the Kid-like figure adrift in a frontier town where everyone’s in costume. The scenes conflate Dylan’s work on the Pat Garrett sound track and his Gethsemane with the Band at Woodstock, but in the end it seems as if all Haynes could do with the Basement Tapes was play off the menagerie on the inside cover. The Dylan suckup industry is so huge these days it’s hard not be a little exasperated at the A-list folks lining up just to get a little reflected glory. I mean, you’d think Martin Scorsese or Haynes would at least find it interesting that Dylan married a former Playboy bunny named Shirley Noznisky. But no—she has be made into a famous artist, and be played by Charlotte Gainsborough. Speaking of which, save in those segments in which American piggishness must be portrayed by grotesques, a lot of the supporting players here have suspiciously high cheekbones. That, the hipster appearances (like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in an entirely cuttable segment), the uneven performances, and some jarring moments (like actual footage of Dylan playing, which intrudes, to no purpose, at the end), make this a largely unsuccessful film. Beyond that there’s an air of … not self-indulgence, exactly, but the feel of someone whose ambitions far outstripped his abilities, or whose intentions were never fully formed. The result feels more like a desperate, unfocused tribute to Dylan than an organic (and aesthetically independent) work of art.

All that said, there’s fun to be had here for Dylan fans who don’t care that much about the truth: there are the scraps of Dylan lyrics in magazine ads, passing references to characters in his songs, and some carefully schematized nods to key bits of Dylaniana. (For example, in keeping with the redolence of the film’s title, a heretofore unreleased Dylan bootleg track, Haynes includes not only a careful recitation of a key Rimbaud line, “Je est un autre,” but also the most reverberating Dylan mot from Dont Look Back, the 1966 Pennebaker documentary: “I’m sure glad I’m not me.”) In the Pat Garrett segment, Gere puts on a clear plastic mask similar to the one Dylan sports in some of the more compelling live footage from his Renaldo and Clara movie, which I think was the film’s one reference to the Rolling Thunder era. And I can’t swear to it but I also think Haynes in a couple of the Blanchett scenes took the time to re-create moments from Dont Look Back or other Dylan footage from the time.

p.s. The controversies over Dylan’s epochal switch to electric are I think overplayed, both here and in No Direction Home, which is credited to Martin Scorsese. Haynes has a comic interlude in which Dylan and his band turn machine guns onto the crowd; Scorsese makes the issue the frame of his four-hour film, plainly suggesting the controversy drove him into seclusion. The complaints of a few priggish folk aficionados have now created an image of “Rite of Spring”-like riots. In fact, “Highway 61″’s first single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” became an immediate huge hit; the war was essentially over before he played Forest Hills, a month after Newport. (The best by-the-minute contemporary reportage on this remains Robert Shelton’s biography, also called No Direction Home.) It doesn’t fit into the rock mythos very well, but in large part Dylan stopped touring to lower his fame quotient and raise a family in (relative) peace. It can’t have been easy to be married to Bob Dylan, but Sara (née Shirley) Lownds (née Noznisky) did have her husband around during those years–Dylan didn’t make regular concert appearances again until 1974.

p.p.s. The film No Direction Home really isn’t a documentary. It’s an assemblage, by Scorsese, of a lot of promotional material that the Dylan organization had generated. (The highly unusual sight of Dylan speaking, coherently and at length, about his influences and career, was the product of the simple expedient of the interviewer’s being his manager.) The film, while engrossing, isn’t journalism or a true documentary. That it was awarded a Peabody is a minor scandal.