Not Judas – Jesus. Timothée Chalamet’s hilarious and seductive portrayal of Bob Dylan establishes him as the grinning, scowling, reluctant leader of his generation, whose refusal to submit to the crucifixion of folk-acoustic purity is his own crucifixion. Chalamet gives us a semi-serious torture from someone who is part Steinbeck hero, part boy band star, part sacrificial deity. When Chalamet’s Dylan mockingly asks if he is God, he replies, “How many more times?” Yes.” Chalamet shows us the mysterious burden of celebrity and zeitgeist ownership that a singer-songwriter who transcends John the Baptist (in the form of the fatherly and sad-eyed folk mentor Pete Seeger – wonderfully played by Edward Norton) and Finally, his dozing apostles had to wake up in the Garden of Gethsemane playing electric guitars, in his legendary words, “damn loud.”

James Mangold’s biopic, co-written by him and Jay Cock, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!” Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the night that divided the ’60s; It is the story of Dylan’s musical and personal adventures in the first half of the decade, when he electrified the world of folk in every way. He was carried further and further by the folk movement, which valued his poetic talent but was dissatisfied with what he saw as folk’s regressive, museum-like serenity (and Dylan is shown here not explicitly engaging with their socialist traditions explains); he longs for the new modern energy of rock ‘n’ roll as the musical form he must master if it is not to surpass him.

Elle Fanning is gentle and sensible as Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York; Her name is Sylvie Russo, but she is based on Suze Rotolo, who appeared on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan walking arm in arm with him through New York’s Greenwich Village. Monica Barbaro is an elegant Joan Baez, with whom Dylan rudely cheats on Sylvie and whose beautiful, if trillingly cultivated, soprano voice he describes as perhaps too beautiful; However, he semi-graciously allows her to cover his famous songs, including Blowin’ in the Wind, and to appear on stage with him, perhaps sensing that her softer, mainstream presence will accelerate his own success. Norton is the gentle, wise Seeger who gives Dylan his big break and is deeply angered by Dylan’s sullen, rebellious rejection of purist folk at his beloved Newport Folk Festival; Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, whose country style and easy-going stage power inspire Dylan (Cash, of course, was played by Joaquin Phoenix in Mangold’s Walk the Line as a far more complex and subdued character); Scoot McNairy has a recurring, thankless appearance as the totemic Woody Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s disease and to whom Dylan sings at his hospital bed.

And of course Chalamet is a mesmerizing Dylan, playing the tracks himself and enacting the pot-smoking birdsong to a truly impressive degree. He plays a very passable version of “Don’t Think Twice” with the trademark eccentric intonations, singing as if he’s unsure of the melody and appearing to be out of breath at the end of each line.

Chalamet also masters Dylan’s outrageous comedy in both art and life: impish, witty, insufferable yet wounded, someone whose habit of wearing dark glasses indoors gets him beaten up. How did he come to sing and talk like that? How did Minnesota’s Robert Zimmerman sound rougher and less intelligible than Seeger or Guthrie? His claim that he learned guitar chords from cowboys at fairs deeply irritates Baez, who says he’s a complete idiot. But Mangold and Chalamet show that his calling lies in self-invention and reinvention; the shapeshifting that needs a troubadour comedy as a cover and that takes him to folk and then, untethered, to something else.

In real life, the cry of “Judas!” from an audience angry at their electric guitars was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, but this film transfers it to Newport. In fact, this film shied away from acknowledging the significance or even existence of the British Invasion; The Beatles are hardly dismissed more emphatically than Donovan, and their meeting with Dylan in 1964, during which he is said to have introduced her to weed, is not shown here – perhaps because the film only leaves room for one musical deity.

Impersonating Dylan is a near-impossible task, and this film itself risks the “Judas!” problem. Reaction from the Kenner fan base. In 2007, Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There divided the film into a series of enigmatic characters, with Cate Blanchett giving her hilarious turn; With 2014’s “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coens tackled Dylan in their own oblique way, with Oscar Isaac as the failed non-Dylan folk musician from the same period doomed to obscurity. No fictional Dylan can compete with the reality of documentary filmmaker DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back. Chalamet is more accessible and simply more present than the original.

Interestingly, despite the classic music biopic tropes that Mangold made so popular, the story doesn’t conform to the classic rise-fall-learn-experience-comeback format. Everything worked out, but was troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing courage in this performance.