The life and music of Bob Dylan are dramatized as a series of shifting personae, each performed by a different actor—poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity, rock and roll, martyr born-again Christian—seven identities braided together, seven organs pumping through one life story, as dense and vibrant as the era it inspired.

Arthur (Ben Wishaw), a renegade symbolist poet, serves as the film's narrator, while being interrogated by a nameless commission as to the motivations, subversive undercurrents, and political misreadings of his work. His witty, ironic responses provide counterpoint to the chapters of a life that begin to unfurl.