MOVIES - CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK - Tangled up in clues - Even Bob Dylan's most minutiae-minded minions will have their hands full with 'I'm Not There.'

Help! I've followed a rabbit named Todd Haynes down a fantastic aperture, and now I'm having trouble pulling myself out. I'm talking, of course, about "I'm Not There," the filmmaker's fantasia about Bob Dylan. As an avowed Haynes nut (I even own an old bootleg copy of his Barbie-filled tragedy, "The Karen Carpenter Story") and aspiring Dylan know-it-all (I wrote the text panels for the 2004 museum exhibit "Bob Dylan's American Journey"), I'd been waiting a long time to see what he'd do with the Mystery Tramp.

A first viewing revealed that there's one obvious way to enjoy "I'm Not There," which opens in L.A. on Nov. 21, and that's to chase the references. The movie is a homage to 1960s art films, a meditation on mediated identity, and a lovechild of pop and the avant-garde. But it's also a game. The extraordinary detail of Haynes' re-creation and manipulation of Saint Bob's cosmology begs for Dylan fans to connect the dots.

Though Haynes has said in interviews that he hopes Dylan freaks won't get caught up in those bio-mythical details, I must respectfully say that such a request is ridiculous. Only a so-called Dylanologist could have made this film, and Haynes can't deny us the pleasure of noting every shirt that matches one worn in a vintage film clip, and every quote lifted from a press conference from 1965.

There's a serious side to all this allusion. "I'm Not There" crystallizes a particular viewpoint that's dominated Dylan talk for more than a decade. It's the Trickster take, in which the singer-songwriter's gift for theft and chameleonic behavior is played up so strongly that he no longer seems like an individual at all, but a harmonica-slinging humanoid archive of American mythology.

This take on Dylan is a rich one. For one thing, it's helped revive interest in many lost touchstones of American music and literature; for another, it's helped Dylan avoid getting stuck in a web of baby boomer self-love. Haynes makes the most of the Trickster take by placing each of his six Dylanesque figures in a memory-rich landscape that intersects and goes beyond the songwriter's own.