Even before the masses knew Bob Dylan’s nasal voice and elusive persona, they knew his songs from covers by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary and Joan Baez. Over the last 45 years, singers have never tired of giving the Dylan catalog a whirl, but the way they’ve approached his songs has changed considerably.

In the ’60s, covers by the Turtles, The Byrds, and Manfred Mann evinced respect and admiration, but not breathless devotion. By comparison, the covers on the soundtrack for the defiantly eccentric Dylan biopic I’m Not There are positively reverent, all the more curious because they’re coming from such an irreverent collection of indie rockers. To Jim James, Yo La Tengo, Stephen Malkmus, and Jeff Tweedy, Dylan is a Mount Rushmore figure, and they all seem slightly cowed by the challenge of reinterpreting the man.

Like the film, the soundtrack caters to the obsessive Bob-ologists out there, not the casual browser. Even the apparent changes to Dylan’s original intent are often rooted in obscure Dylan outtakes and live performances. For example, the album’s most valuable cover, Malkmus’s “Can’t Leave Her Behind,” beautifully adapts an unreleased song that Dylan played with Robbie Robertson in a hotel-room sequence from the rare 1966 film Eat the Document.

Many of the covers here are simply too obvious (and faithful) to register, from Mason Jennings’s auto-pilot “The Times They Are A Changin’ ” to Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” But a few tracks redeem the whole double set: Cat Power laying the Stax, southern-soul treatment on “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”; Tom Verlaine slowing down “Cold Irons Bound” and making it even creepier than Dylan’s original; and finally, Sonic Youth’s detached, zoned-out recasting of the title song, which appears in Dylan’s rough Basement Tapes recording with The Band. The song isn’t one of Dylan’s best, but it oozes mystery and soulful inscrutability.