Meet Dylanologists: Timothée Chalamet is a surefire Oscar contender for Best Actor as a young Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.”

It’s a great, soon-to-be-legendary piece of acting, with Chalamet mimicking Dylan in his looks (that curly hair!), his sound (he sang himself), and his iconic grin, without ever indulging in party trick mimicry.

Now for the worrying part. “A Complete Unknown,” the film that features Chalamet’s brilliant performance, arrives in theaters with the intention of living up to its title. After 141 minutes of screen time, you won’t know any more about Dylan than you did when you started.

No wonder the famously reserved Dylan, now 83, chose this fragile membrane of a film from James Mangold, who directed the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line,” and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks, who wrote Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes.” from 2015, approves of Elektrolich!” as the source material.

Surprise! Mangold created a portrait of the artist as a young idiot. Irritable, boorish and smug, the future Nobel laureate appeared to be a real nuisance even in the early days when the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, born into a close-knit Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, was hitchhiked to New York Year 1961 was ready to make a name for itself. He was 19.

“A Complete Unknown” ends in 1965, when Dylan outraged folk purists at the Newport Folk Festival by plugging in an electric guitar and entering the rock phase of his career. His friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) tells Dylan to “make some noise and leave some mud on the carpet.” Dylan didn’t need reminding. His genius is in the music.

It’s the music that triumphantly sums up “A Complete Unknown” with its 40 songs, some of them in frustrating snippets, that propel the film to fame. Chalamet spent years preparing on guitar and harmonica and sang live with the raw Dylan grit that captivated me from his first bleating “Hello” to the breathtaking “The Times They Are a Changin.” You won’t see a better example of interpretive art this year than Chalamet’s total immersion in the role of Dylan.

The musical interludes are so frequent that one could justifiably call it “A Complete Unknown,” a concert film with dramatic interludes that unfortunately don’t come close to matching the music.

The film leans heavily on biographical banalities, particularly when Dylan meets with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a pseudonym used at Dylan’s request for the art student and political activist Suze Rotolo and who appears with Dylan on the cover of his groundbreaking album The Pictured is Freewheelin’ Bob Dyan” and the muse for his “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

Sylvie complains that Dylan rarely lets her in and is dismissive and arrogant when she asks questions. The same is true when Dylan enters into a tempestuous relationship with folk goddess Joan Baez, sung and played with crystalline clarity by Monica Barbaro (“Top Gun: Maverick”). In a heated moment, Sylvie seethes with jealousy as Dylan and Baez perform a duet on stage.

The stuff of frothy soap operas, these scenes are sanitized into tired clichés that rebuke everything Dylan stands for as a no-bull lyricist. Screen time is better spent watching Dylan immerse himself in the Greenwich Village music scene, which is vividly recreated on screen. It’s easy to understand the envy Baez feels when she hears Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time.

It is the folk icon Pete Seeger, played with sly ease and concentrated fire by an extraordinary Edward Norton, who introduces Dylan to a wider audience and his musical idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), now in hospital due to the devastating consequences of the Huntington’s disease is almost silent. “I wanted to capture his spark,” Dylan says. Mission accomplished.

Guthrie is unable to speak as Dylan plays his musical tribute “Song for Woody,” but hits his bedside table in response. Dylan’s caress of Woody’s cheek is a rare display of love. And it hits hard. Dylan was serious when he said that Guthrie’s music “knocked me down.”

“A Complete Unknown” is too harsh and ignores too many facts to show us what it feels like to be Dylan, a master at remaining masked and anonymous and too slippery to pin down.

It is the dynamite actor who plays him who reveals this shapeshifter in flashes and enveloping darkness. Chalamet’s stirring performance, one for the time capsule, captures Dylan in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as a multitude, a fugitive troubadour and poet, always creating, always in the wind.