Bob Dylan isn’t even dead, but that hasn’t stopped artists from making him the subject of career-spanning films, mythologizing his life and work, and reading the verdict of his time as a musician.

One thing on which we can rely as listeners, like the prevalence of pirated (“shared”) music on the internet, or the fact that rock and roll will not, finally, die already, is the continuing mark of Bob Dylan’s influence on popular music. From the early sixties up until the hit or miss period that began in the seventies, he released nine albums that have led the way for popular music as much as it has acted as a stranglehold. Country rock? Dylan collaborated with Johnny Cash on Nashville Skyline. Folk? Dylan got that out of the way with his self-titled, 1962 debut. And of course, there’s that thick mix of electric/acoustic songwriting with the potent lyrics, the incredible backing musicians, and the expectation hanging heavy in the air like opium smoke. It’s these records, Bringing it All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited that made Dylan’s career, and continue to make it. No week passes without someone, either a music listener or a musician, touting his accomplishments and reveling in his influence.

But what makes Dylan’s place in popular culture so surprising is that he never stopped doing what he wanted to do, a dedication that simultaneously informs what made him so reputable and respectable an artist, and what is so difficult and annoying (not to mention unlistenable) about his legacy. After the salad days of the '60s, Dylan took a bizarre turn, pumping out perplexing double albums like the self-parody Self-Portrait, converting to Christianity and charting his soul’s journey with Saved and Slow Train Coming, and frightening his and The Grateful Dead’s fans with the live document Dylan and the Dead, which continues to draw derision even today.

The Beatles were a great group who never made an album worse than the good Let it Be, and while their career is discussed with a scary sort of reverence (they were bigger than Jesus, after all), it’s doubtful that Sir Paul McCartney will ever be granted the respect and adulation thrown at his feet when he was the scuffy-haired, big dreamer behind “Yesterday.” To be fair, McCartney is still enormously respected, but just as often derided or taken for granted thanks to thirty-plus years of so-so, occasionally godawful recordings. Dylan’s in the same boat, but somehow even his mistakes made to appear like the missteps of a genuine, real-deal sorta guy, who was just doing what he could. McCartney? Not so much. With a transparent personality, it’d be wrong to expect any myth-making to be derived from McCartney’s post-Beatles output, but the continuing worship of Dylan, and now even the Dylan of Saved! defies even the expectations of the most fawning of aesthetes.

The talented Todd Haynes stepped into music biopics with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, filmed with Barbie dolls as the main characters, and continued his course with the glam rock Velvet Goldmine. In making his Dylan biopic I’m Not There, Haynes co-wrote the script and famously cast six actors and actresses as Dylan or facets of Dylan’s personality, fully encompassing the move from “voice of a generation” to spiritualist, from a whippersnapper hot on Woody Guthrie’s coattails to wayward family man. Quipped Newsday writer John Anderson, “If you are, as you say, so tired of the old, then here is the new. Embrace it, or please shut up.” The film itself can certainly be seen as Anderson sees it – as a brave new step forward, an inspired retelling of Dylan’s story. But dispensing of whether or not the film is a success, how “new” is it to heap yet more praise and scholarship into arguably one of the most mined personalities of the twentieth century? And furthermore, why do we really need another retelling of Dylan’s life? Are Don’t Look Back, the recent Scorsese biopic, and the self-penned Chronicles still not enough?

In one of the best parts of Haynes’ feature, we see Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg acting out one of the least romanticized part of Dylan’s life – the slow crumble of his marriage to Sara Lownds. The part of the film that details their separation is mostly set apart from Dylan's career (he is reinvented as an actor), and instead deals with the silences and terse explosions that follow them, and most other couples, during a divorce. It’s so unmistakably true to life, especially the difficulty inherent in sharing custody over their two daughters, that it begins to raise more questions than it answers. The other parts of the film dealing with Dylan’s initial forays into music and his infamous electric set at The Newport Folk Festival have been so overstated and obsessed over that maybe Haynes’ odd approach in some part was an attempt to breathe life into these over analyzed parts of his life. And yet, weird approach or not, it’s the most succinct, plain, and universal parts of I’m Not There that work the best.

It’s strange to think that we’d need a humanizing portrait of Dylan after all these years - after his career lurched for a decade or two through poor decision after poor decision. But Haynes’ biopic is all about giving Dylan his due, as both a hotshit, womanizing folksinger and as a sad divorcee. Granted, there’s a lot to explore here, though all of it has been poured over before – and not just in film, but in books, and even television. Dylan’s influence is enormous, but Haynes’ fair but tiresome exploration of the man and the myth is only as fascinating as the picked-over, minute details of the folk singer turned rock musician’s life and works. Surely there can be a point when Dylan can be done to death, though it doesn’t look like we’ll ever throw up our hands and grow tired of exhuming his triumphs and mistakes. The amount of Dylan scholarship is disproportionate to the important work that has gone on in popular music since the advent of the sixties, and it’s a weird distribution of focus. At this point, even Dylan might beg us to just throw on Self-Portrait for some perspective, if only to show us that maybe he was – and might still be – as tired of all that undue, overdone attention.

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