I don’t own much from my high school days, but there are two things I’ve carted around for 40-plus years with an obsessive devotion that goes beyond sentimentality.

One is a Martin D-18 acoustic guitar so beat-up that Willie Nelson would be proud to own it. The other is a 1965 concert poster featuring a black-and-white photo of a very serious Bob Dylan — the one on the cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” album. To acquire that poster, I had to defy my parents; lie to school authorities in order to skip Friday classes; hitchhike from Salem to Knoxville, Tenn., for the advertised concert; and suffer lockdown for an eternity. It was all worth it and I’m still proud of that reckless road trip.

That youthful hero worship has solidified into a conviction that Dylan is one of the great, innovative artists of my generation. This is the guy that put this piece of poetry into a rock song: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” He also broke the three-minute mandatory length of pop tunes, wrote hundreds of memorable songs and composed unforgettable music that redefined rock ’n’ roll structure. I’ve argued with people for years that he’s a great singer with an expressive voice perfect for his music. He’s got range and he’s never off-key. After all, you don’t want Donny Osmond singing “The Gates of Eden.”

Filmmaker Todd Haynes must share that assessment of Dylan or he wouldn’t have invested so much research and moviemaking bravura in “I’m Not There.” It’s an audacious and visionary approach to the musical biopic unlike anything else that’s ever been done. Haynes spurns the conventional narrative arc for a format as surrealistic and impressionistic as Dylan’s songs themselves. He takes facets of the Dylan legend, facts from his life, artistic influences, the people and symbols in Dylan’s songs and shakes and bakes them into a fascinating whole. A warning here: Despite the dazzling moviemaking, I’m not sure that non-Dylanistas will be as engaged as true believers. We meet six Dylans during the course of the movie, none bearing his chosen name or his real name, Robert Zimmerman.

The first Dylan we see is an 11-year-old black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie after Dylan’s troubadour hero. Played by Marcus Carl Franklin, he rides the rails with his flat-top guitar and composes Dust Bowl protest songs. Then there’s Jack, played by Christian Bale. He’s an urban folk singer who fades from the limelight only to return as an evangelical Christian. Heath Ledger plays Robbie, the guy who stars as Jack in a biopic about the singer. He’s the Malibu Dylan with a long-suffering wife played by the remarkable Charlotte Gainsbourg. Arthur Rimbaud, a nod to the French poet who influenced Dyan’s lyrics, is another Dylan who this time faces the camera solo. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, a Dylan outlaw alter ego who evokes the Sam Peckinpah-Hollywood Dylan and his “Renaldo and Clara” period.

Finally, there’s Jude Qinn. Cate Blanchett plays this mid-’60s, electric Dylan who is the only one who looks like the real thing and she’s remarkable. Her mannerisms are uncanny. This gender-bending performance surpasses John Travolta’s as the heavyset mom in “Hairspray.”

The Dylan enigmas, self-inventions and the bad behavior are acknowledged. So is his determination not to be labeled or crowned a spokesman for any cause or movement. Haynes leaves us with the notion that Dylan is a complex and unsolvable riddle. But at the end there’s the music, and that’s when the genius speaks for itself.