For the deconstructive director of the protean Bob Dylan film, “I’m Not There,” the fervor to create and, more to the point, recreate started very early.

“The first movie I saw was ‘Mary Poppins,’ when I was 3, and it triggered a response of obsessive creative output,” Todd Haynes said at an HBO Films Directors Dialogue at the New York Film Festival. “Making drawings, acting out scenes, dressing Mom up as Mary Poppins. I had to live and breathe what I had just seen.”

It’s a consuming enthusiasm that Mr. Haynes, 46, still has in full. In conversation this weekend with the Village Voice film critic and festival selection committee member J. Hoberman, the director of “Velvet Goldmine” and the Oscar-nominated “Far From Heaven” poured forth a heartfelt cavalcade of ideas and history not unlike the dense sweep of his latest film.

The genesis of “I’m Not There,” which uses five different actors and a kaleidoscopic structure to render Mr. Dylan, came seven years ago. After moving to Portland from New York (“My peers had found their apartments and long-term relationships and were having babies”), Mr. Haynes plunged into Mr. Dylan’s work while prepping his last film.

“I was writing ‘Far From Heaven’ at night, and listening to Dylan by day, reading biographies, discovering the bootlegs,” he said. Though the director remembered enjoying Mr. Dylan’s greatest hits as a Los Angeles high schooler in the late 1970s, what struck him years later was the singer’s absolute “fearlessness” as “fundamentally a performer.”

Undeniably, that quality fueled Mr. Dylan’s tumultuous reign in the pop-culture imagination of the ’60s. “The roots to all of Dylan’s characters are in the ’60s,” Mr. Haynes said. The Dylan of “I’m Not There,” roughly bounded by the end of the Vietnam War, is a six-fold creation combining the singer’s artistic phases with fully manifest personas: Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale more or less play Mr. Dylan himself, but there’s also Marcus Carl Franklin, an astonishing child actor, as a rail-hopping Woody Guthrie-like incarnation; Ben Whishaw as Mr. Dylan as Rimbaud; Richard Gere representing Mr. Dylan in exile as Billy the Kid, and more.

For Mr. Haynes, the approach works on several levels. Besides exploring his subject’s own need for reinvention and avoiding the pitfalls of a biopic (i.e., “one kind of overworked performance,” as My. Haynes aptly put it), “I’m Not There” evokes the heady churn in America at the time, and the desire for a “moral clarity.”

“Dylan swung from periods of certainty to uncertainty, and in a way that’s what the whole country did,” Mr. Haynes said. “We swung from the civil rights era, then the Vietnam War picked up, and protests in the South turned to riots in the North. We still never recovered” from that period.

But just as viscerally, the movie’s invigorating complexity brought Mr. Haynes, a semiotics major as an undergraduate at Brown University, back to far more primal cinematic experiences. “I keep thinking of movies I saw when I was younger. The great movies were always the ones that keep opening up for you,” he recalled. “Going to see ‘2001′ with my dad. It was an experience that would be bigger than you, more than you could take in at one time.”

Unsurprisingly, the head-spinning visual flow of “I’m Not There” features Mr. Dylan’s music prominently, both the touchstones and otherwise. “A song like ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ had such an important historical meaning and played out a dramatic inside/ outside dichotomy that was inescapable in the ’60s,” Mr. Haynes said. “Thin Man” appears in a memorable scene about the Black Panthers, who were in fact obsessed with it. “But there are also personal favorites,” Mr. Haynes continued. “‘Going to Acapulco’ is a throwaway for some people. It’s absurdly melodramatic, but heartbreaking, and the language is so simple, like a child’s rhyme.”

Securing the rights to Mr. Dylan’s music was a necessary coup. For his 1998 film “Velvet Goldmine,” Mr. Haynes lacked a key vein of glam rock when David Bowie refused to allow the use of his music. (“We narrowed it down to ‘All the Young Dudes.’ Harvey [Weinstein] tried, Michael Stipe tried.”) But after meeting up with Jesse Dylan, a son of the singer and also a filmmaker, as well as Mr. Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, Mr. Haynes and his producers were asked to submit a one-sheet proposal.

“I was told to avoid all the big words: fame, genius, accolades. They kept adding: ‘Don’t do this, don’t say that,'” Mr. Haynes said. The result? As Mr. Haynes heard it, “Dylan said, ‘Jeff, you like these people? Let’s give them the rights.'”

Since then, festival-goers have reaped the rewards, as will more audiences when the film is released in November at Film Forum and elsewhere later in the fall. Mr. Haynes reflected on the long road from inspiration to creation with affecting sincerity: “Something about the original feeling goes away. What you forget is it happens with every movie — it starts out with love and turns into labor. Hopefully, you can turn it back around so the love is available to you guys.”

Coming from an artist in the very top echelon of American filmmakers, making perhaps his quintessential film, it’s hard to not to share the love.