Rarely does an American filmmaker convey such unwavering faith in his subject, biographical or otherwise — and especially movie-going audiences — than writer-director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) does with his Dylan ode, I’m Not There. He shows a vigorous trust that the audience can keep pace with the shifty and shifting Bob Dylan “personae” gracing the screen in wildly varying physical, racial, and gender incarnations. He has the assurance that audiences will enter this world with pre-ordained wisdom, that they have already laid thanks at the Dylan altar. True or not, Haynes doesn’t insult your intelligence.

Dylan’s career arcing moods are channeled via the poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, electricity star, rock n’ roll martyr, and born-again Christian. With Haynes’ careful brush strokes, these are all one in the same, but all played by different actors who are black and white — child, men, and one gender-bending woman. Marcus Carl Franklin, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett — they’re all Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan.

Before his easel, Haynes dabs a masterful painter’s stroke in every color of the palette to create an original and impressionistic portrait of the life and times of folk and political singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Yet, this film is not a traditional movie biography in the Ray (2004) or Walk the Line (2005) vein, trying to take you inside the artist’s universe, inner circle, head, etc, to stare into the faces of demons. Even those with faint knowledge of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash’s career trials and tribulations come away from those Hollywood treatments with a reasonable sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both as entertainers and men.

With Haynes’ Dylan, you’re safest proceeding with abandon. This isn’t an artist exposé. It’s far from revealing. You won’t learn anything titillating about Dylan, even if you don’t know anything about him. It’s a pop culture tour dé force trying to delicately frame a symbolic snapshot of the “'60s generation” — that group’s need to express unrest, to speak up and right wrongs, to protest — civil rights, women’s liberation, the Vietnam War. For baby boomers - above all, those who came of age in the 1960s - the symbol of their dissatisfaction and angst was - is - Bob Dylan.