I appreciate that James Mangold uses the title of his Bob Dylan biopic to admit defeat. Maybe that’s not quite fair. The title A Complete Unknown conveys Mangold’s purposeful thesis about the inherent elusiveness of Dylan, the ways in which he repudiated understanding of his inner being from the very first time his strums resounded through the smoky air of a New Greenwich Village club. It is a movie about one of the most important and influential of American songwriters coming of age artistically across the first half of the nineteen-seventies. In that, it is mostly a movie that adheres to and honors Dylan’s own myth-making. That is its strength, and that is its weakness.

A Complete Unknown begins with Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arriving in New York City, acoustic guitar at his side and cantankerous attitude already at the ready. He immediately seeks out Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), hospitalized with Huntington’s Disease that has cruelly left him voiceless. In that dismal hospital room, Dylan also meets Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, in by far the film’s best performance) the truest true believer that folk musician ever had. Seeger sees an artist in this mumbling, presumptuous kid and he offers an earnest mentorship. As Dylan ascends, his orbit keeps crossing that of Seeger, whose insistent affability becomes smothering. There are conflicts aplenty in the narrative, but Mangold (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks) is most engaged by the dramatic tension that comes from Dylan’s desire to move beyond the hoedown troubadour mode that Seeger wants to see him settle into as a standard bearer who can take over for Guthrie.

Mangold lovingly recreates the scene Dylan moves through in those years, from the hip clubs to the modest, magical recording studios to the Newport Folk Festival stage where Dylan’s electrified revolution reaches its tipping point in a scene laid out with all the nuance of a Marvel movie climax. He makes room for famed figures such as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), and Alan Lomax, and peppers in more of Dylan’s songs (all the performances are voiced by Chalamet and the film’s other actors) than even a jukebox musical could muster. As an early hits collection and a primer on the basic touchstones of Dylan’s rise, A Complete Unknown does its job capably and in a consistently entertaining fashion.

The film grows more intriguing when Mangold leans into ambiguity, keying off the calculated inscrutability of Dylan. Even as the film acknowledges the power of a song such as “Masters of War,” especially in how it meets the political moment in which it was made, Mangold strongly suggests that Dylan was less engaged by the state of the world than the interest in those affairs that he saw in others. If the citizens Dylan spied staring through an appliance store window at news coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis had instead been rapt by a corn flakes commercial, he might have written jingles. That opportunistic element of Dylan’s approach crashes up against the demands of being an entertainer, which he churlishly rejects, maybe it part because he’s jealous of the mastery of it he sees in Seeger and Baez. Soft as A Complete Unknown can seem sometimes, it takes real nerve to make a movie about an iconic figure with obsessive fans and use the line of dialogue “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob” as a guiding thesis.