However, Dylan's ability to create spectacularly baffling lyrics doesn't exactly translate to the medium of movies, where there isn't the benefit of a catchy chorus or comparably efficient four-minute (or 11-minute in the case of "Desolation Row") track time.

Dylan's film project "Masked and Anonymous" is the cinematic equivalent of a train wreck, except without the excitement. And it's nearly as impossible to decipher as anything Dylan has put to music.

It's still great for Dylan-heads, while everyone else is just going to leave the theatre scratching theirs.

Dylan wrote the screenplay and stars as Jack Fate, a virtual clone of himself who is neither masked nor anonymous. Grim, tight-lipped and staggeringly terse, Dylan portrays Fate like Norm McDonald impersonating Clint Eastwood on "Saturday Night Live." Dylan at least looks larger than life with his cowboy hat, slick southern suit, wrinkle-lined face and black, pencil-thin mustache.

The plot is secondary at best, practically taking a back seat to the make-up applied on Dylan's real-life and fictional backing band A Simple Twist of Fate. (The band name, also a famous Dylan lyric, is just one of the bah-zillion real-life Dylan references.)

For what it's worth (and it's worth very little), the storyline goes something like this: Dylan as Fate gets sprung from a South American prison to headline a benefit concert put on by an uber-sleazy concert promoter played by John Goodman. Jeff Bridges is a demented journalist assigned to cover the show and Penelope Cruz, Val Kilmer, Luke Wilson, Jessica Lange, Angela Bassett and a host of other stars show up just for kicks.

Dylanesque one-liners abound, e.g. "We're all looking to kill time in our own way, but in the end time kills us all." But mostly the dialogue is just throwaway drivel, e.g. "The meaning of life is life."

Each character is another Dylan archetype: the outlaw, the drifter, the swindler, the scheming beautiful lady, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But each is ultimately undeveloped, uncompassionate and hollow. Especially puzzling is Luke Wilson's simultaneously mechanical and frighteningly passionate Dylan sycophant who shadows the master's every move – like some who will see this movie, no doubt.

Dylan performs his own songs randomly sandwiched between plot "developments" (and I use the term loosely). But he is easily upstaged by a young adolescent black girl whose a capella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is clearly the film's best two minutes.

But even Dylan can't tie all these disjointed elements together, and there remains little consistency and zero coherency. There are decent acting performances (Goodman is more than good) and puns that quickly grow tiresome, but there's no driving force and nothing really entertaining. Most often, it's just plain boring.

But it all has to mean something, right? This is Dylan, and don't we all know how enigmatic the little guy can be? Well, if you're still awake and looking for meaning after 107 increasingly tiresome minutes, the best clues come from two lines spoken as the frayed plotlines collide toward a chaotic ending.

The first line comes during a Dylan performance when Cruz's addled character says, "I love his songs because they are not precise — they are completely open to interpretation." The other line is when Dylan himself says in the final scene, "I gave up looking for meaning years ago."

The filmmakers seem to be hedging their bets with these words. If the audience fails to "get" the film, then they can always default to one of these two easy alternatives: a) the meaning is whatever the viewer makes of it, or b) there is no meaning and everything's just absurd.

As an artist, Dylan has every right to make whatever statement he desires. But after $8.50 and 107 exasperating minutes, I expect a little more than this. Especially from a legend.

Grade: D