Six different actors portray Dylan at different stages of his career in “I’m Not There,” each tackling the legendary musician’s peculiar demeanor and distinctive mannerisms in their own way. None of the characters are actually named Bob Dylan, and, in some cases, it is difficult to determine to what extent they are based around actual events in the musician’s life. Director Todd Haynes took an unusual post-modern approach to the movie, thoroughly dismantling the concept of a chronological plot structure.

The youngest Dylan prototype is played by Marcus Carl Franklin, who portrays an 11-year-old hobo who calls himself Woody Guthrie and plays guitar on freight trains. An enjoyable moment for Dylan fans comes when Richie Havens makes a cameo appearance to sing “Tombstone Blues” with Franklin on a dusty front porch. Franklin’s acting is impressive, and his exaggerated anecdotes add humor to the film, as he relates stories that make him seem more like an aging folk relic than an 11-year-old boy.

Christian Bale plays Jack Rollins, a character framed around Dylan’s early years in New York, when he began garnering recognition for his “protest” songs. Although Bale competently grasps many of Dylan’s enigmatic traits, he seems terribly miscast in the role. When he recreates Dylan album covers or demurely chats with an interviewer, hunching over his guitar and barely lifting his head to speak, it seems like Bale is doing a Dylan impersonation in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Next comes Cate Blanchett, who plays Jude, a version of the beleaguered Dylan of the mid-1960s, when legions of former fans spurned the singer for going electric and abandoning his folk roots. Blanchett is the only actor in the movie to capture Dylan’s character with any sort of convincing aplomb, nailing the skinny idol’s style of speaking and gesticulating. Her segments in the film are closely based around footage from a 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” which followed Dylan’s 1965 tour of England and was reproduced in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 doc, “No Direction Home.” If you’ve seen either of the former documentaries, you won’t learn anything new from Blanchett’s performance, although you will get to see Bob Dylan played by an Australian woman.

Blanchett’s segment is both the most fun and the weirdest of the batch. After recreating an interview with a reporter, (accurate almost word-for-word to an interview with Time magazine shown in “Don’t Look Back”), Dylan’s classic “Ballad of a Thin Man” plays while the interviewer navigates a bizarre sort of circus show in which he becomes the clueless “Mr. Jones” referenced in the song. There is also an odd section in which Blanchett dances and falls down laughing with the Beatles, as if in a scene from “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Heath Ledger plays a rather arrogant actor who once portrayed Jack Rollins in a movie. Yes, Ledger is acting as an actor who once acted as a fictional singer who is ostensibly based on Bob Dylan. Follow? It is unclear what, if anything, Ledger’s character has to do with the real Bob Dylan, although his marital troubles and custody battle for the couple’s two young children could be seen to mirror Dylan’s marriage to former wife Sara.

Then we have Richard Gere. Gere plays Billy, an aging man who lives in a little country town, rides a horse and has trouble corralling his dog. The town is in danger of falling victim to a new highway, or something, and Billy is not pleased about it. If anything like this ever happened to Bob Dylan in real life, it’s news to me. In any case, Gere’s part is so disjointed from the rest of the film that some viewers at The Music Hall seemed visibly and audibly frustrated, even angry, about his presence.

Finally, there’s Ben Whishaw, a Dylan look-alike who is seated before some kind of judiciary panel for reasons unknown to the viewer. Whishaw, who introduces himself as Arthur Rimbaud, does not seem to be acting out a particular period in Dylan’s life, but he occasionally appears on the screen to deliver Dylan-esque adages.

Julianne Moore makes several appearances in the film as Alice Fabian, a character based on folk singer Joan Baez, who helped launch Dylan’s career in the early 1960s. Moore speaks directly to the camera, as if being interviewed in a documentary, as Baez was in Scorsese’s film. These occasional forays into documentary-style filming further confuse the viewer, who begins to wonder, “What are we watching here? Is it a documentary, a mockumentary, a plain old fictional movie or a combination of all three?”

There are some fun moments in the film, like when Jude and poet Allen Ginsburg (played by David Cross) heckle a crucifix in a field (“Why don’t you play your early stuff!” Blanchett yells at the crucified Christ), or when a character based on Pete Seeger tries to sever the wires to Jude’s amps with an ax. But, overall, the film is disjointed, confusing and uninspiring. God help you if you’re not a Dylan fan and you’re trying to make sense of this movie. The best thing it has to offer is a continual parade of Dylan songs, often performed by the master himself, but sometimes sung by the actors (Christian Bale does a lovely rendition of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”).