Timothée Chalamet tries his best in A Complete Unknown, a Bob Dylan biopic that plays too safe

Bob Dylan wants to be heard, not known. He used to claim that he’d run away from home as a child, that he’d joined the circus and lived an existence of adventurous toil. His origins, in truth, were as humdrum as can be. Director Todd Haynes, in his attempt at a Dylan biography, I’m Not There (2007), cast multiple actors in the role, heavy hitters like Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Richard Gere. But it was Cate Blanchett who came the closest to bottling his essence – that actor with the eternal twinkle in her eye, busy formulating a joke you’ll never be privy to.

James Mangold, with his new Dylan biopic, has come armed with ropes and tent pegs. He’s the kind of sturdy, reliable filmmaker who’s settled at the very foundations of Hollywood – the man behind Marvel’s Logan (2017), Ford v Ferrari (2019), and last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. And he’s cast a real star of the moment, Timothée Chalamet, who’s faithfully dedicated himself to the rickety suspension bridge of Dylan’s voice, the cocked head, and wry smirk. A Complete Unknown takes a reverent stance to Dylan’s artistry, populated by technically accomplished musical performances (Chalamet’s voice isn’t perfect, but it’s undoubtedly impressive), and shot with a real sensitivity to the emotional landscape of each track.

It’s dutiful work. But dutiful doesn’t really cut it with Dylan. A Complete Unknown opens with the musician’s arrival in New York City in 1961, a puppyish enthusiast searching out his heroes, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). It ends with the moment he bid them adieu, creatively, by performing with electric instruments, thus stretching his hand out to the rock scene, at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival. People booed, allegedly. Others stood in silent awe. The scene, as scripted by Mangold and Jay Cocks, and based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, is pure Hollywood mythmaking. A fist fight breaks out as men scramble for the plug.

But the film is also, as conventional biopics demand, a romance, as Dylan is torn between his sweet, civilian girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) – a real person renamed here, touchingly, to protect her privacy – and folk musician Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), herself evidently touched by genius. Barbaro offers a perfect study of Baez’s broken-bird voice, of a woman with an unusual, faraway look in her eyes, committed always in thought to her art.

But A Complete Unknown lacks the same ignition point of Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005), fuelled as it was by the total ferocity of love between Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny and Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter. The director even replicates the same pivotal confrontation: both movies feature their leading man singing a duet of “It Ain’t Me Babe” with their new love, while their current partner sits in the audience, a look of bitter revelation spreading across her face. Here, the comparative absence of bite in Dylan’s portrait becomes all too obvious (it doesn’t help that Johnny Cash appears in A Complete Unknown, played by Boyd Holbrook, as a sexy, troubled guardian angel to Dylan).

Chalamet, perhaps, isn’t as perfectly poised to play Dylan as Phoenix was to play Cash. There’s something a touch too uncrumpled about his persona, even if the steam-cloud coif and sunglasses barricade help with the transformation in his later scenes. But he’s still a formidable talent, and there’s a bittersweet moment he plays towards the end, standing by Guthrie’s hospital bed (McNairy and Norton, it should be noted, are very strong in their limited screen time), that speaks so purely to the uncertainty and terror of a young artist in search of his voice.

Yet, despite the drip-fed reminders of contemporary history (the Cuban Missile Crisis! the Kennedy assassination! Weren’t the Sixties wild, man!), A Complete Unknown struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music. The conflict between acoustic and electric, Seeger and Dylan, was about more than old versus new, or the rebellion against antiquated institutions, as Mangold’s film tends towards. The real argument against Dylan was that, by going electric, he’d in fact betrayed the authentic, politically radical heart of folk. It’s a conflict explored with far more curiosity, albeit ironically from the other side, in Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterful Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). A Complete Unknown could have provided an ideal rebuttal. But without that insight, Chalamet is left without much of a vessel to pour his passions.

Dir: James Mangold. Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, and Scoot McNairy. Cert TBC, 141 mins

‘A Complete Unknown’ is in UK cinemas from 17 January