“A Complete Unknown” captures Bob Dylan's songs and personality

For many music lovers, both in the 60s and after, Bob Dylan provided one of the most important soundtracks to our lives. Count me among that group. It is gratifying, then, that director James Mangold relies primarily on Dylan's songs to define him and his political environment in his biographical film, "A Complete Unknown."

With this as a strong, definitive, and informative framework, Mangold avoids formulaic pitfalls of the tired musical biopics while also capturing Dylan's real appeal—atypical lyrics, his singular vocal delivery, and his, at best, brooding, conflicted presence in the spotlight. The impressive, actual singing of Timothée Chalamet as Dylan all but erases the differences between his and Dylan's tentative, self-conscious façade. Edward Norton as Pete Seeger also convincingly performs Seeger's songs, though Seeger fawns a bit excessively over Dylan's surprising newcomer talent.

The film begins with their first interaction. It's 1961 when Dylan arrives in New York from Minnesota to visit an ailing Woody Guthrie, a hero to Dylan, hospitalized in New Jersey. From there the film branches out to follow his increasingly popular singing career up to the July 25, 1965 Newport Folk Festival, with Dylan's immensely unpopular choice of electrically amplified instrumentation booed and cursed. It was 2002 before he would perform again at Newport. Sandwiched in are his relationships with Sylvie Russo, a very good Elle Fanning who deserved more complex development, and Joan Baez, Monica Barbaro, here treated better by Dylan than other accounts report.

"A Complete Unknown" factors in events involving his manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), festival organizer Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), and others. Based on Elijah Wald's 2015 "Dylan Goes Electric! Dylan, Seeger, Newport, and the Night That Split the Sixties," the narrative builds to this event. From beginning to end, Dylan remains detached and standoffish, rightly so. Several comments he makes and actions find him recoiling from fame and the suffocating, unwanted attention from fans. He accurately notes that "if anyone's gonna hold your attention on a stage, you have to kind of be a freak." Apocryphally, he also comments, "Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should just let me be . . . whatever it is they don't want me to be." "A Complete Unknown" adds another cinematic chapter to the documentaries and fictionalized portraits of Dylan, and yet he forever remains elusive and mysterious, withholding more than he reveals or offers. At cinemas beginning December 25. Check listings.