Bob Dylan was reinventing himself long before changing identities like clothing became a necessary step in celebrity rehab. Throughout the ’60s, Dylan became the most famous folk singer, the first punk rocker, and a pioneer of roots rock in quick succession, and somehow always landed on his feet no matter who he managed to annoy.

“I’m Not There,” the latest film from acclaimed director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven,” “Velvet Goldmine”) takes on the problem of the ever-changing Dylan by calling up six actors (including Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and, yes, Cate Blanchett) to play representations of the enigmatic musician at various stages of his life.

Watching the film spurs plenty of questions, some of which Haynes was happy to answer recently for Metromix.

A lot of people, especially younger people, may not know much about Bob Dylan. Do you think they will respond to “I’m Not There?”
I don’t know if you need to know a great deal about Bob Dylan to enjoy the film, and to take a journey into this very specific time, and into this very central artist to that time. I hope the film helps young people feel like Bob Dylan … that it reinfuses him with a bit of excitement, risk and irreverence.

What brought you to this project?
It all started in this flood of a fresh obsession with [Dylan] that I found myself in at the end of my thirties. [There was] this very unplanned, unfocused, spirit of love and obsession which Dylan can provide. He’s someone who encourages change, encourages a sense of regeneration in your life. It was so apparent, so consistent, this idea of him as somebody who changes. He enters these phases thoroughly, and then exhausts them and moves on. He almost rejects it to clear the air and start fresh.

So that led to creating seven different "Bob Dylans"?
The seven psyches that emerge all kind of split him up in these components that I felt needed to be distinct. And yet they needed to have a link to each other. As one character explores his world and reaches certain impasses or barriers, it forces the next character to be the solution to those conflicts.

Why did you choose to make the young Dylan an African-American character (played by Marcus Carl Franklin)?
The “Woody” story is really about the early years of Dylan, when he first came to New York. He was in the thraw of Woody Guthrie, and Woody Guthrie’s music and attitude and style and look and all those things. It’s really about how the creative process can begin through impersonation, how you want to be anything other than the things you are.

In this case, it’s almost a joke on passing. Dylan was passing. He was pretending he wasn’t a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota, and he wanted to become connected to this grassroots history of Americana. The amazing thing is how everybody went along with it.

I wanted to take it a step further and have this kid who was obviously not Woody Guthrie, obviously not the thing he said he was, and have people just accept it. Marcus is doing this very complicated and delicate dance that’s a performance within a performance. You can see behind the corners that people are pulling the wool over their eyes and enjoying it, but it’s just such a demanding role for someone Marcus’ age. How he nails it is just amazing to me.

You’ve dealt with popular music before in your films “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” and “Velvet Goldmine.” What is it about pop music that attracts you?
It’s something we all can’t help but respond to. There’s something amazing about pop culture and popular music, because it can exist on the airwaves and have passed through the market, and still emerge as this accident, or this rupture, or something that turns the rules upside down for a moment. I felt like I was dealing with examples of that in this film. It is incredibly powerful and unique just what Dylan was able to do to the popular song, how he could explode it with politics and philosophy and subjectivity and, really, art, doing high art on the jukebox, as the [Allen] Ginsberg character says in the film. That’s really what he did. The astounding thing is how popular he remained while doing that. That was always the goal for me, the level to achieve.

In all of your other feature films, you’ve addressed gay issues or featured gay characters. Do you feel “I’m Not There” breaks from those themes?
[“I’m Not There” is about] rethinking conventions, of reconceiving ideas of stable identity. This is what interested me about glam rock [in “Velvet Goldmine”], which wasn’t really about gay people or straight people, it was about the embrace of the bisexual, which makes gay people and straight people uncomfortable. It’s where things slip, it’s that hybrid, it’s that in-between, that place where categorizations are unreliable. That’s what so radical about Dylan. This film proposes the idea about freedom actually being freedom from yourself, from staying put and being definable.

Why is the film called “I’m Not There?”
“I’m not there,” is a song that [Dylan] recorded during the “Basement Tape” sessions in 1967 in Woodstock. It has this mystery that precedes it. The first time you hear it you say, “wow, that’s what they’re talking about.” But then you play it again and it has this arresting quality because it’s a kind of work being formed as you’re hearing it. There’s words and there’s structure and these things he hasn’t yet decided. Because it escapes literal language, it’s almost more powerful and stronger. The title, and the sense of displacement that it suggests, was something that just made sense to me.