The gift of Bob Dylan’s music is to make the world seem stranger, or rather, to make it seem as strange as it really is. He sings of life as a river of jumbled signs and sensations, some real and some not, and whose meaning goes beyond words. Even at his most strident, he spouts an anti-narrative: “Thou shalt not simplify, classify, categorize.”

A complete unknownJames Mangold’s biography, which focuses on the Bard’s early career, understands this – and reveals it. The film portrays Dylan as a prophet who brings independence and quirkiness to a world full of rule enforcers and rule followers. Timothée Chalamet does an excellent job creating Dylan’s balance between otherworldliness and humanity. But no film about unconventionality should be as monotonously conventional as this one.

The problem begins at the level of conception. Mangold has chosen to examine the most chewed-up chapters of Dylan’s career: his early days in the New York folk scene, beginning in 1961 and continuing through the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he shocked acoustic guitar purists by switching to electric Switched to guitar. With the Newsie hat on his head, Dylan storms into Greenwich Village at the beginning of the film, kicking around and quickly winning the admiration of his idols – Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash – as well as the scene’s rising star, Joan Baez. Rebellion brings recognition, which raises public expectations, which breeds even more rebellion: a cycle that remains true to Dylan’s life, but also to that of many previous iconoclasts portrayed in the film.

Mangold knows the rules of biopics well; his cash exploration in 2005, Walk along the lineset the modern template for how to direct the life of a complex individual into a satisfying arc. Here the director and his co-writer Jay Cocks deviate from the original in a fascinating way. Dylan’s habit of lying and misleading has made the question of who born Robert Zimmerman really is and why exactly he does what he does one of music’s enduring mysteries. Instead of trying to solve the case with a backstory that provides psychological cause and effect, A complete unknown just leaves Dylan…unknown. When he tells Baez that he used to be a showman, she replies, exasperated, that he was full of it. That can certainly be the case. But he lives out an idea that he confesses in an important part of the dialogue: to be successful on stage, you have to evoke the same fascination as a freak show.

Read: Bob Dylan reveals himself in 66 songs

Chalamet does just that. He plays Dylan with a taciturn silence, making it seem like he’s constantly on the verge of falling asleep, murmuring as if in a dream. The film is full of performance scenes in which Chalamet captures Dylan’s controlled unpredictability and sings in a way that transforms folk conventions into a galactic spiral of emotion. The real 1960s Dylan was a little lighter and funnier than the solemn figure portrayed by Chalamet, but his joker soul occasionally shines through, as when he announces himself as God and then breaks into a grin. And while Dylan himself had some influence on the film, Chalamet doesn’t diminish the artist’s cruelty; At one point, with glassy anger in his eyes, he tells Baez that her songs are like paintings in a dentist’s office.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film has the same antiseptic quality that Dylan resisted. New York seems as stagey and cheerful as an amusement park. Dylan’s romance with Sylvie Russo – a fictionalized version of his real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning – seems designed primarily to provide insight into Dylan’s love songs. Historical giants are sketched in 2D: Ed Norton’s Seeger is a gentle idealist with a touch of cunning; Monica Barbaros Baez is full of confidence, except when she’s completely insecure. Most irritating are the groaning winks to the audience. “Be careful with that thing!” Seeger admonishes as Dylan rides his motorcycle, a few years before the singer’s career-altering, still-mysterious accident in 1966.

Thanks to Chalamet’s acting, the film’s hokiness doesn’t completely detract from the viewing experience. But if A complete unknown is Hollywood’s grand, Oscar-tempting summation of Dylan’s legacy, the implication is sad: even as the entertainment industry tries to celebrate originality, it insists on predictability. The film doesn’t have to be an arthouse mystery – Todd Haynes already took this approach to Dylan in 2007 I’m not there– but a shaggier, more naturalistic version would have better suited its subject matter. At least the film conveys a true idea: worshiping an artist is different than listening to what they have to say.