Folk music is something you hear mostly in the elegant first part of the often beautiful “A Complete Unknown” – it’s something that happens in the next room, down the hall, in another club further down, behind the crazy tambourine man. You lean in to hear it, as do the characters, who come together as if answering a call. Do they form a community? That would be too sentimental. This is a scene.

Banjo chords float through the corridor of a spooky, nearly deserted psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, where an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) receives visitors. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), walking through Greenwich Village, hears something new, slows down, and ducks into a basement to take a look. And some children notice it too, when one morning in the breakfast nook of their wooded cabin, a stranger their father brought home – a boy named Bobby – struggles through the changes to a new song as sunlight softens the air. The room is enchanted.

Bobby is, of course, Bob Dylan, played here by Timothée Chalamet in an almost magical performance that sets off just the right sparks: novelty, genius, a touch of reserve that Dylan probably found easier to fake than modesty and, behind it, a kind of aggressive, combative one Hunger. Chalamet has already taken his young messiah to a dangerously dark place in the Dune films; His Dylan is cut from the same cloth and feels uncomfortable when the mantle is thrust upon him. Director James Mangold favors the actor with long takes where you forget Chalamet is there, just a master poker player waiting for the right hand to go all-in.

Superfans won’t necessarily love this. It’s a film made with love, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be idiots. On the other hand, its hero is hardly better shaken than in “A Complete Unknown,” where the tunes are vividly presented (classic after classic, all sung live by the cast) while things are carefully kept chronologically spread out over the roughly four years that each biopic , which is interested in Dylan’s artistic arrival, would have to cover from his penniless arrival in New York in 1961 to his rebellion at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Todd Haynes did all that and more in his dazzling, experimental 2007 film I’m Not There, which even gives a bewigged Cate Blanchett a chance to impersonate the singer, but Mangold’s straightforward approach can be done Definitely a valid entry course.

Read more: Elle Fanning follows “A Complete Unknown” through the eyes of a fading muse

In shaping the material (based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!”) into a screenplay, Mangold and Jay Cocks – an collaborator of Martin Scorsese on some of his later adaptations (“The Age of Innocence”, ” Silence”). ) – landed on a counterintuitive but brilliant organizing principle, one that I don’t think any biopic about a great man has ever attempted. For this dream to come true, that is, for Dylan to come true Dylanmany other people’s dreams had to die. We already know about the Minnesotan’s penchant for self-revision and self-destruction, and the film includes a bar mitzvah photo in a secret scrapbook.

But here too there is a surprising amount of collateral damage. You can see it in the collision of genres – folk, blues, rock – and his keen sense of popular art as the film changes. Edward Norton brings a gentle Pete Seeger to the film, someone used to leading audiences with peaceful, utopian songs, but increasingly confused by this newcomer who sharpens the folk movement into a spear and then turns the battle into one completely different direction.

Dylan’s women suffer tremendously; They are the heart of the film. We watch Barbaros Baez struggle with his distance. Their tryst begins explosively: after their first night together, they get up and learn that the Cuban Missile Crisis is fortunately over. (“Well, that’s it,” murmurs a bedridden Chalamet.) Then they sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” into the sheets. However, it doesn’t take long for Baez to tire of his distance. Their sold-out tour as a duo turns into a nightmare full of snipers on stage.

Elle Fanning, already one of American cinema’s finest sufferers, steals the film with her version of Suze Rotolo, here renamed Sylvie, Dylan’s girlfriend at the time. An attractive, confident Manhattanite with a busy schedule of activism, teaching, and volunteer work, she radicalizes Bob and takes him to civil rights speeches. But look at how the film shows him turning away and acknowledging the growing crowd. She’s already losing him, and Fanning’s character, with her ruined eyes, can’t do anything about it. As she watches Dylan and Baez sing “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” she flees in panic as Fanning uncorks the close-up of the year.

“You gave her the song,” Sylvie accuses him a little earlier, quietly and dejectedly, a line that leads to something deeper. He gave us all the songs. And then he became ours, even though 60 years later we still wonder what we actually got.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.