Four decades may have passed since the Summer of Love, but our cultural fascination with the music, fashions and social upheaval of the 1960s refuses to fade away. In the coming months, a slew of new films on rock’s holy trinity of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones is coming to our screens. Fresh documentaries on The Who and the Kinks are also in the works, plus a feature based on the tragic life of the record producer Joe Meek.

Music biopics are big business, with Walk the Line and Ray earning both Oscars and box-office glory. Tales of troubled rockers overcoming their demons and finding redemption are now such a Hollywood convention that they are spawning their own spoofs. Scripted by the Knocked Up creator Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan’s forthcoming comedy Walk Hard takes satirical potshots at Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, among others.

Glam rock, punk and grunge have all inspired the occasional big-screen drama. But the 1960s remain the favourite default setting for rock movies, for obvious reasons. At no other time before or since has pop music been so closely interwoven with political change, generational conflict, sexual liberation, chemical excess, high art and high fashion.

Rock films are now part of the heritage industry. They allow the Woodstock generation to look back fondly from the safety of middle age on a lost era of idealism, hedonism and preposterous facial hair. And those of us who were too young for the 1960s get to relive these high times vicariously. The soundtrack is always great, too.

But these stories also contain lessons for today. “We should all draw from that period,” argues Todd Haynes, the director of the highly anticipated Bob Dylan “biodrama” I’m Not There. “Vicariously, nostalgically, retrospectively, it doesn’t matter. It’s worth continual reexamination. We are still unpacking the 1960s. It was great because it was a time that demanded you take a stand on what you thought about things. That meant being aware politically and culturally.”

Unveiled to positive reviews at the Venice Film Festival two weeks ago, I’m Not Therebelongs to a new generation of meta-fictional rock films that do not just immortalise legendary artists but construct new legends of their own. Haynes has boldly blurred Dylan’s life story with his songs, his writing and his broader cultural hinterland. Six actors play the Dylan character at various stages in his career – among them Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett, whose performance won her the best actress award at Venice.

“This was never going to be a straight biopic, so I chose to focus on the place where his creative life and his real life intersected,” Haynes says.

With I’m Not There, he hopes to “explode any preconceived notions about Dylan into a thousand shimmering pieces”, but also to reclaim the outlaw energy and alien intelligence that made the singer so great in the first place. A big lie, in other words, which aims to reveal a deeper truth.

“Dylan is so worshipped, so approved,” Haynes says. “ The New York Times should have a separate section called Dylan Arts and Leisure because there is always an article about him. When you worship someone too much, you lose the grit and the sweat and forget the risks that he took.”

Haynes has never met Dylan, but the reclusive singer tacitly approved I’m Not There through his management. In return, Dylan gets another highbrow homage that deepens his legend while revealing nothing concrete about the Sphinx-like singer.

Fresh from his own exploration of Dylan mythology in his marathon documentary No Direction Home,the director Martin Scorsese has not one but two Rolling Stones films in the pipeline. The first, Shine a Light, records for posterity an intimate Stones show staged during the band’s recent Bigger Bang tour.

“Basically it’s a concert film,” says Scorsese. “I’m fascinated by performers and I like to edit to music. It becomes to me like choreography. And believe me, Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood move a lot!”

Another child of the Woodstock generation, Scorsese has been circling the Stones for much of his career, frequently using their songs on his soundtracks. Indeed, Shine a Light grew out of another collaboration he is planning with Mick Jagger, a behind-the-scenes drama about the rock business called The Long Player. Another myth-making biopic?

“It’s not a biopic, it’s more a history of America through the music business,” Scorsese says. “A fictional film based on actual events, like Casino.”

Meanwhile, rock’s most fertile decade is being reimagined once more in Across the Universe,a stylistically ambitious retro-musical set to a soundtrack of 32 Beatles classics. The director, the Broadway veteran Julie Taymor, calls the film “a love story set during this incredible turmoil and passion and the psychedelic mind-exploration part of the 1960s.”

But this is a parallel-universe 1960s in which the Beatles themselves do not exist, though their storytelling lyrics have somehow been made flesh. Key characters are called Jude, Lucy, Prudence, Doctor Robert, Mister Kite – you get the picture. Bono and Eddie Izzard have cameo roles. Think Moulin Rouge! meets Forrest Gump.

Scheduled to open in Britain later this month, Across the Universe has already generated plenty of advance publicity in America, much of it negative. The producer Joe Roth angered Taymor by chopping 40 minutes out of her poorly received two-hours-plus edit and retesting it with preview audiences.

Taymor’s film may well annoy Beatles purists, but it is not the first meta-fiction to plunder the Fab Four’s platinum-plated back catalogue. In 1978 the Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood put together a psychedelic screen musical based on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Featuring the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton and Aerosmith, the film was almost surreally awful. But its soundtrack album of wretched cover versions still sold extremely well.

Indeed, myth-making biodramas such as I’m Not There and Across the Universehave a long and chequered history.

In 1998 Haynes directed a kind of dry run for his Dylan film in the form of Velvet Goldmine, reinventing the glam-rock 1970s as a gay love story between a thinly disguised David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Bowie was not amused. Two years later, Bono concocted the Hollywood rock-star fairytale Million Dollar Hotel with the director Wim Wenders. Inspired by a U2 video shoot, it felt like a rock opera. A very, very bad rock opera.

Bob Dylan himself even got in the act by scripting and starring in Masked and Anonymous in 2003, a freewheeling sci-fi parable designed to feel like one of his own songs. Once again, it was a star-studded stinker, but did little to dent Dylan’s critical standing.

More noteworthy were Michael Winterbottom’s Factory Records postmortem 24 Hour Party People and Gus Van Sant’s sombre epitaph for Kurt Cobain, Last Days. Both tookknowing liberties with real rocklives, blending straight biography with speculation. Lies that told a deeper truth.

“We weren’t interested in doing a documentary,” recalls Winterbottom. “We decided if we were going to make it, we should make it in the spirit of Factory, and part of that spirit is mythologising itself.”

But films such as 24 Hour Party People and Last Days are rare exceptions. Rock’s creation myths were mostly forged in the 1960s, and that decade remains the chief source for most pop cinema. Perhaps because, in this secular and egalitarian age, the Beatles and Dylan have taken over from biblical and classical literature as our shared cultural reference points. Richard Gere, who co-stars in I’m Not There, likens Dylan to Shakespeare, with a universal resonance to his work that allows endless reinterpretation in any era.

“He is probably the most influential artist of my time, in almost every area,” Gere argues. “He is the only contemporary artist who will still be discussed 200 years from now. Not Picasso. Bob Dylan.”

Across The Universe is released on September 28; Shine a Light and I’m Not There open in 2008

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