Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown (Focus Features)

The title of this atypical biopic is somewhat appropriate. Its portrayal of musician Bob Dylan remains enigmatic and intentionally opaque to a certain extent. The movie raises questions about his Minnesota origins (Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman) and his seemingly innate talent, as it slyly nods to his fabricated biography of his life spent in carnivals. Girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), whom Dylan meets at a civil rights talk at Riverside Church, accurately refers to him as her “mysterious minstrel.” (Sylvie is based on his real-life partner at the time, Suze Rotolo.)

Director James Mangold focuses less on biographical details and more on Dylan’s music, which might single-handedly bring the folk movement back into vogue. The filmmakers had plenty of material to work with for the soundtrack, as the timeline spans Dylan’s early 1960s career—arguably his most revered and well-known period, though that’s not to dismiss his later albums like Blood on the Tracks (1975).

While some dramatic liberties have presumably been taken with Dylan’s Greenwich Village years, credit Mangold for crafting suspense around a question fans already know the outcome of: whether Dylan will go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and alienate his colleagues, particularly his mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

Mangold leans on wall-to-wall music, largely performed by Timothée Chalamet, who convincingly channels the singer-songwriter with a benign casualness without rigidly imitating him. Reaction shots carry much of the storytelling, avoiding the turgid expository dialogue often found in biopics. Screenwriters Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks cut to the chase, focusing on the romantic triangle between Dylan, Sylvie, and singer-collaborator Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, who makes a star entrance as she takes the stage to sing “House of the Rising Sun”). In this regard, Dylan doesn’t come out smelling like roses. He does both women wrong. Yet the romantic intrigue becomes a subplot to the moods and musical wanderings of Dylan, who, sporting sunglasses, further promotes his impenetrability. (Chalamet and Barbaro’s cover version of “It Ain’t Me Babe” stands alongside the original duet recorded live in 1964.)

One distinction between Chalamet’s Dylan and the real-life figure is hard to miss: Chalamet exudes movie-star charisma, with a boyish and unthreatening sexual appeal that eclipses the Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary on the star’s 1965 tour of England, Don’t Look Back. There, Dylan, whether chatting with teenage fans or evading questions from the press, is reserved but slyly performing. (With his slouched, Chalamet’s also uncannily resembles Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There from 2007.)

The film’s perspective is largely uncontroversial, save for its portrayal of Seeger as a staunch, stick-in-the-mud purist who fears Dylan’s departure from acoustic folk norms. He’s the ringleader of what Dylan wryly calls the “posse of purity.” Here, the filmmakers give in to the myth that Seeger nearly severed the sound system at Newport as Dylan performed his set. This has been debunked by many musicologists, though it’s safe to say Seeger wasn’t pleased with Dylan’s new musical direction.

More convincingly, the movie sharply contrasts the era’s cultural divides: the moneyed martini crowd, hosting a party in Dylan’s honor and expecting him to perform, and the folk counterculture, which soon fades into the rock and pop scenes—and PBS fundraising drives. That said, the re-creation of Greenwich Village looks right, but no cigar: The above-ground electrical lines point to on-location filming in New Jersey.