It ain't me, babe. Bob Dylan to be played by a woman in his life story

Bob Dylan has given permission for a film to be made about his life. But as might be expected with a musician who favours the unpredictable, it will not be an orthodox biopic. Dylan will be played by seven actors, including a woman and an 11-year-old black boy.

The singer is allowing unprecedented access to his music and previous film work to the director Todd Haynes, with whom he has forged a close friendship.

Haynes, interviewed in today's Independent Review, contrasts the attitude of Dylan with that of David Bowie, who did not allow his music to be used in Haynes' glam-rock film Velvet Goldmine. To the astonishment of those who know how tightly he guards his material and his image, Dylan has agreed to give the director a free hand to use his back catalogue of recordings.

Haynes, who describes the film as "a multiple refracted biopic", says: "I can use whatever I like. It's in ink." He also reveals that the screen character who most resembles Dylan will be a woman.

The closest Dylan has ever come to a real-life screen biography was Don't Look Back, D A Pennebaker's fly-on-the-wall documentary of his 1965 tour of the UK.

The sprawling, four-hour road movie Renaldo and Clara (1977), which he directed, scripted and starred in, intercut concert footage from the now-legendary Rolling Thunder tour with some teasing dramatisations of the rumours that surrounded his life. It starred, among others, Dylan's first wife, Sarah, the folk singer Joan Baez and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

But the expectation among fans for the Haynes film will be increased by the fact that Dylan will allow the director to use any of his music that takes his fancy. There is still a considerable quantity of "bootleg" and unheard Dylan material, and some unseen film, such as footage of his 1966 tour of Britain, when he turned to electric music and received the famous catcall of "Judas".

Haynes says: "It epitomises Dylan's ... renegade spirit that this is the project that he gives his approval to – one that's a totally de-centred kind of biopic. In some ways he is not so distant from punk or glam. He's so surly, he always had this rather hostile persona, and he would kick away whatever his last phase had been – swapping acoustic for electric for instance – in much the same way Bowie did."

Aside from music, the film project has a uniquely colourful life story to draw upon. Dylan's career has been endlessly shape-changing, and maddeningly paradoxical. The figure at its centre has long been regarded as one of the authentic geniuses thrown up by popular music, a writer who invented both the epic single ("Like a Rolling Stone", "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands") and the seriously poetic lyric ("Chimes of Freedom", "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"). After Dylan's mid-Sixties masterpieces – especially Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – rock music left behind its puny kid brother, pop music, in the playroom while it became a thing of visionary splendour, a fusion of folk music, country, blues, gospel and 4/4 rhythm, its lyrics demanding comparison with Browning or Keats.

The man himself has contrived to remain a brooding enigma all his life. Speculation and wild rumours have dogged every turn in his career: his relationships (with, among many others, Joan Baez and Marianne Faithfull), his 12-year marriage, his near-fatal motorcycle crash in 1966, his decision to forsake acoustic for electric music, his apparent conversion to born-again Christianity, his gnomic pronouncements, his drug problems and periods of silence, the constant rumours that he was about to be given the Nobel Prize for Literature ...

He was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941, in the town of Duluth, Minnesota, where his father, Abe, worked for the Standard Oil Company. The family moved to Hibbing in the same state, and Bob learnt to play guitar (and write poetry) in his teens. Heavily influenced by Elvis Presley, he formed Elston Gunn and his Rock Boppers, and declared his ambition to play with Little Richard. At the University of Minnesota in 1959, he listened to the folky pioneers of rock, Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. Inspired by the latter, he dropped out of college and headed for New York, where he played in the newly opening folk clubs and coffee houses of Greenwich Village.

He changed his name to Bob Dylan (apparently in homage to Dylan Thomas, though he's always denied it) and began playing solo at tiny clubs with names such as St Paul's Purple Onion Pizza Parlour. Discovered by the New York Times music critic Robert Shelton, he was signed by Columbia Records for a debut album full of covers of elderly blues tracks and two original songs. It was 1962. He was 21. The pop/rock explosion was waiting around the corner.

His second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, came out a year later, a jaw-dropping series of songs that would become classics, not just of the Sixties airwaves, but of Western culture: "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", "Girl from the North Country", "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" ... Thereafter he seemed to tire of protest songs, in favour of more personal, emotional material, and to tire of the folk movement. When he released Bringing It All Back Home, using a nine-piece electric band on half of the tracks, the concept of folk-rock was born, to the undying hatred of folk purists everywhere. Others adored it. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was described by John Bon Jovi as "the first ever rap song".

After that manic stream-of-consciousness and his motorcycle accident, Dylan stepped back into the low-fi simplicities of country music with John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait.

By 1970, fans and critics assumed he was washed up. But his early-70s comeback LPs Planet Waves and Blood on the Tracks were his first No 1 hits – and for another 30 years he kept changing tack, shifting musical ground, writing songs, touring and never subsiding, as if a force of nature. His look grew weirder – his face pancaked with white make-up, his eyes like burning coals, his head surmounted by a woolly hat – but his iconic status as a titan of popular music was never in doubt.

His decade-long Never Ending Tour nearly came to an end in 1997 when he was struck down with a dangerous heart infection called histoplasmosis. But after surgery he recovered fast and was back on the road by the autumn.

In December last year, he received the highest award bestowed in the United States for artistic excellence, one of the five Kennedy Centre Honours.

My Back Pages: Players in Dylan's Life Story

DYLAN THOMAS

The presumed influence behind the change of name from Robert Allan Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, although the musician has always denied the influence.

ELVIS PRESLEY

Dylan used to imitate Presley at school. Presley later returned the compliment, covering a number of Dylan songs including "Blowin' in the Wind" and "I Shall be Released". The influence of country and blues are evident in both men's works.

SARAH DYLAN

The mother of four of Bob Dylan's children, who was married to him from 1965 to 1977. The marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce but they remained in close contact.

GEORGE HARRISON

The Beatle was a huge fan of Bob Dylan's music. He, of all the band members, retained the closest links with Dylan and together they formed the Traveling Wilburys in 1988.

ALBERT GROSSMAN

A ruthless businessman, lover of music and the former manager of Bob Dylan. His wife, Sally, is pictured on the cover of "Bringing It All Back Home".

TOM PETTY

A successful musician in his own right with the Heartbreakers. He led Bob Dylan's touring band in 1986-87 and became a fellow Traveling Wilbury.