You can see a master's hand in Masked and Anonymous--the newest entry in the misbegotten pantheon of movies by, about, and/or starring Bob Dylan--but it's not the hand of a master filmmaker. It's the hand of a master songwriter who emerges every few years to represent himself on film. The movies pass like signposts on Highway 61, offering subtle variations on the theme (sometimes he's a loner-poet-mystic-rocker, other times he's a divorced loner-poet-mystic-rocker). Together they trace the evolution not of what Dylan means--a puzzle locked in his records--but of what he thinks he means.

And though the answer to that question only gets weirder as the years progress, it's not hard to see why he keeps indulging his Achilles' heel. The first Bob Dylan movie (Don't Look Back, 1965) is basically the greatest rock 'n' roll movie ever made. No one has ever been cooler than Dylan in 1965, and no rock Narcissus has ever been more alive to the camera's invitation to self-invention. Captured by director D. A. Pennebaker at the axis of a crucial turning point, and at the moment of combustion, Dylan offers himself up as a nonplussable badass poised to conquer Britain armed with a guitar, a harmonica, a typewriter, a mouthful of daggers, and the greatest hair you'll ever see. And the live stuff looks great.

Who can blame him, then, for wanting to revise and revisit the triumph in Eat the Document (1966), a chronicle of his second UK tour, the one where he went electric. This time, Dylan took the reins, editing footage shot by Pennebaker, thus demonstrating what happens when a rock star tries to engrave his own image. Eat the Document is a total mess of speed tweak and intentional incoherence. The live stuff looks great, though.

Next came Renaldo and Clara (1978), a four-hour magnum dirge of quasi-mystical, emetic autobiography interspersed with performance footage from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. The massive cast (Dylan, then-wife Sara, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, et al.) deconstructs Dylan's emotional distance, by way of sub-beat improvisation and group-therapy-style role-playing. A tough sell, even for die-hards. The live stuff looks great, though.

By way of a brilliant turn in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)--as Fool to Kris Kristofferson's Lear--Dylan returned to Dylaniana with Hearts of Fire (1986), a regrettable rock 'n' roll fable featuring our hero as a wizened R&B road dog. Not even the live stuff looks good.

Which brings us to Masked and Anonymous, a goulash of unintentional self-parody and paranoid sociology that will surely be the last attempt to distill the Dylan persona into a celluloid hero. While Hollywood actors recite inscrutable drug-logic soliloquies in a landscape that looks like a 3-D rendering of the cover of The Basement Tapes, Dylan creaks inexpressively through the picture, looking half-dead. Fortunately, though, the live stuff looks great.