Most musical biopics sort of write themselves, guided by the legible, historically agreed upon arc of their subjects’ careers, but the Bob Dylan experience isn’t so easy to summarize. With a longevity that denies the truncated narratives of Straight Outta Compton or Control, and an evolving cultural footprint that renders the cradle-to-grave treatment of Ray or Bohemian Rhapsody moot, the sheer mass and movement of the Minnesotan troubadour’s six decades in the limelight make for unwieldy cinematic adaptation. That doesn’t mean he’s gone unchronicled at the movies, with everyone from Todd Haynes, Martin Scoreses and D.A. Pennebaker seeking to untangle the myth, though their efforts, whether through documentary format, avant-garde structure, or both (god bless the freewheeling oddity or 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue), have always chosen a side door through which to approach their subject. It almost makes too much sense to bring in James Mangold, Hollywood’s most celebrated director-for-hire, to hack through the thickets and craft something comprehensible for the masses, though the subject and angle of his approach possesses a flummoxing duality that would make Dylan proud. Like the Nobel Prize winner himself, A Complete Unknown is saying two things at once, even if we’re choosing to only notice one.

The first and most obvious statement pertains to the durability of this genre and its rigid format, with Mangold and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks steering into the crash in a manner that borders on parody. Having cemented his place in tinseltown with the Johnny Cash flick Walk the Line, only to witness it be completely and irrevocably lambasted by Walk Hard just two years later, Mangold returns to the scene of the crime with a dogged determination to run it back, doubling down on cliche and rhetoric in a way that feels argumentative. All our collective chiding of the familiar beats has only emboldened him, daring us to look away from dutiful recreations of moments that still resonate in the zeitgeist all these years later. The devotion to standard arrangements feels less like a hedging of bets than a denouncement of their detractors, a forceful challenge to callous audience members claiming exhaustion with the tried and true, a wager that their eyeballs will remain glued.

One of the quickest ways to prompt this level of engagement is with proper, exciting casting, a prospect in which A Complete Unknown clearly revels. Here, again, is obedience to a proper, triangulated recipe; one part veteran actor playing against type, one part showcase for an exhilarating up-and-comer, and, most importantly, the finishing touch of an ascendant household name realizing their full potential. That first piece is Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger with an aw-shucks affectation that’s both believable and miles removed from the world weary archetype on which he’s built his career. He’s mesmerizing, if only for grasping at an unadorned form of pathos that’s previously alluded him, though witnessing him convincingly shapeshift might not be as affecting as watching Monica Barbaro become a movie star over the course of two hours. Playing Joan Baez with a riveting mixture of natural charisma and under-played incredulity, her turn represents the rare instance of a performer having found their perfect role while promising more great work in the near future.

She’s especially good in her scenes with Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, falling in love with his mesmerizing talent while cutting the man-child behind the act down a peg with a withering glance. Her skepticism, like our own, is warranted; watching Chalamet contort both body and voice to match such an iconic and well-known figure comes with its fair share of discomfort. His performance never fully escapes the uncanny valley of SNL-style impersonation, but with a caricature like Dylan, that might be impossible. Perhaps realizing this unavoidable obstacle, Mangold stuffs the movie to the gills with musical performances, a minefield that the matinee idol traverses with surprising aplomb. Playing guitar isn’t in the same dramatic field as reciting Shakespeare, but Chalamet wields his six string with unmistakable command, and his singing voice wisely augments Dylan’s nasally rasp with a tunefulness all his own. When he and Barbaro navigate a tense rendition of It Ain’t Me, Babe, itself a riff on a remarkably similar scene in Walk the Line, it’s hard to deny the proof of concept.

That scene comes near the end of the film, long after the man born Robert Zimmerman has been freed from the shackles of almost exclusively recording American standards, a point of emphasis that would seem to be at odds with the flick’s initial thesis. Its central figure needs to break the mold to summit lofty new heights, while the movie that captures his early days remains hellbent on reliving past glories, though perhaps this conflation of discovery and tradition is intentional. After all, the groundbreaking freshness of hearing The Times They Are A-Changin’ in 1964 has settled into its polar opposite, its stupefying qualities having long since curdled into a form of complacency. If Mangold and Cocks mean to point out the cyclical nature of boundary-pushing and holding the line, they skew too far toward the latter to fully land the argument, making the movie’s second point of emphasis the more alluring of its dueling conceits.

The Dylan that the film observes, charting 1961 through his legendarily divisive showing at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, is a jerk through-and-through, though the warts-and-all depiction is standard operating procedure in this kind of fare. So are pain-staking empathy and expository elaborations of our protagonist’s motivations, but Unknown side steps these would-be requirements in their entirety. Entering a lavishly recreated New York like a shadowy phantom, the origins of the movie’s centrifugal force are left tantalizingly vague for both the audience and the characters in his orbit. Same goes for the genesis of his lyrics, gesturing at a hunger for societal change and social upheaval about which their writer seems wholly ambivalent. The foundation here is all set up for full-throated hero worship, but there’s an absence at the center, a leering, anonymous ghost in place of a person worthy of championing.

Though the screenplay is loath to offer cumbersome monologues of explication, it does give its skeleton key a voice when Chalamet bitterly observes that those asking how he arrived at a song are merely lamenting that it didn’t come to them instead. It paints him as a cypher, a hollow instrument for god to channel his brilliance and indignation without meaningful impact on its conduit. The innumerable reaction shots of folks gazing upon Dylan in an awe-struck paralysis usually reserved for Laura Dern taking in a brachiosaurus are easy to clown, but they’re not directed at the man himself. Drawn in by the gravitational pull of his talent, the characters are doomed to conflate the blessed aura with the person it surrounds, only to be devastated by the results. He’s either an angel sent from heaven to push a burgeoning cultural movement forward, or a demon in possession of the perfect tools to destroy it from the inside. Either way, his powers seem to be syphoned from somewhere beyond the comprehension of either their purveyor or those in its wake.

As comforting as it is to sort A Complete Unknown among the ranks of Elvis and Rocketman, this insistence on unequivocal delineation between art and artist is more in line with Todd Fields’ Tár, though that modern masterpiece ends up changing course by undermining the notion of genius in general. Unknown believes in unmitigated brilliance, but instead of giving it a saintly avatar, it plays a fly on the wall to the simultaneously galvanizing and deleterious effects of undebatable greatness. It swims in the gulf between the messenger and the message, and the unnerving reality that sometimes those two things aren’t fated to meet in the middle.

Most great movies hone in on a central premise, allowing intrigue to grow from it like branches on a tree. That A Complete Unknown never manages to unite its two guiding principles isn’t the only thing holding it back from the ranks of cinematic majesty; the paint-by-numbers presentation can play like a Wikipedia summary of a historical moment, while the inclusion of famous figures like Johnny Cash, played by a game-if-cartoonish Boyd Holbrook, feel rote and simplistic. Mangold’s affection for well-trodden tropes and their attendant delivery might get the best of him, but the tension between a creator and their creations lingers, a note more novel than we’re used to getting when another titan of arts gets trotted out for their obligatory hagiography. On its surface, it’s understandable to dismiss A Complete Unknown as more of the same, but one would be wise to look under the hood. There’s nothing there, a provocation befitting a trickster like Dylan. The songs are the songs, dense and tangible, prepared for reverence through the end of time. Their singer slips through the cracks like a thick mist, visible but ever intangible.